And so it's on with the dividing of the country, "Ned" style...
And that's not to mention the dangerous lickspittle scribbling of "Ned" as a servile servant to the Chairman Emeritus, and his lust for power and money, where blather about "elites" by comfortable, well off members of his journalistic 'leet is fodder for his angertainment circus ...
As for Queensland, don't get the pond and at least one pond reader started on the naked racism that wanders the streets of that state. They might try to turn Palm Island into a tourist trap and forget its history as a penal settlement with apartheid-like policies, but it's
there for those who care to remember ... and there's still that iron in the toad soul ...
Never mind, back to the dividing spirit ...
With the best wishes in the world, why doesn't David Goodhart GTFO? Does he have the first clue what "cosmopolitan elites" has for a meaning in history"? Could you remind him,
American Jewish Committee ...
That doesn't stop the pond from deploring what Benji and the far right are doing in Gaza, but it should stop loose-lipped clowns from deploying loaded words ... especially when they're being deployed in a paper owned by a billionaire member of a genuine elite of filthy rich people who don't much give a stuff about anybody else, or the planet for that matter ...
At this point the reptiles interrupted "Ned" with his first snap, and the pond decided to get them all out of the way ...
There's a lot more waffle to go ...
It goes without saying that 'cosmopolitan elites' and 'globalists' have been used as terms of abuse by all sorts of dictators and authoritarians and far right loons.
That doesn't stop the pond from deploring what Benji and the far right are doing in Gaza, but it should stop loose-lipped clowns from deploying loaded words ... especially when they're deployed in a paper owned by a billionaire member of a genuine elite of filthy rich people who don't much give a stuff about anybody else, or the planet for that matter ...
Oh sorry, is the pond repeating itself word for word?
Must be the influence of that portentous, pompous clown's blather ... and then things really took a turn for the worst, with only two words needed to mention the problem: David Brooks ...
Um, at this point, the pond will exercise the right for someone from Tamworth to disdain and dismiss every bit of verbiage that comes out of David Brooks' keyboard ... what a contemptible man he is ... and what meaningless categorisation he offers, to the point of gibberish "
The creative class, or whatever you want to call them ..."
So what do you want to call the mango Mussolini, the GOP, Faux Noise and all the power makers, breakers and shakers on the far right in the United States? Is the Donald wanting to marry his daughter something that Brahmin elites do? (Hush, Frank Zappa, no time for your lyrics).
Surely by this point, the pond's strategy was working, surely people were dropping off like flies, surely nobody would be left for the two remaining gobbets and the push to the summit of the "Ned" Everest ...
Speaking of racist and prejudiced, and just one more gobbet and we'll be getting to the pond's traumatic decision to go there ...
Uh huh. Naturally "Ned" is opposed to clean energy - let's dirty the planet until it chokes to death - and racial justice - down with the difficult, pesky, tricky blacks - and atonement for colonial history - we stole the land and we're proud of it and tough titty - and honouring diversity - hang that fag from the nearest lamp post - and securing sexual and gender justice - back in the kitchen women, "Ned" has got too many important things to say, and you wouldn't understand them, what with you being so flighty and foolish... put that apron on, and remember the steak should be done rare, or there'll be hide tanning tonight ...
What a reprehensible old luddite he is, trapped somewhere in the 1950s with Ming the Merciless, or perhaps on some days back with Queen Victoria, celebrating the empire with the onion muncher ...
But at least he's likely to have driven away stray readers, thereby spared the pond's calamitous decision to go there ...
Yes, of course, it goes almost without saying. As soon as someone promises to be a truth teller, you know they're going to tell lies. As soon as they say
"it's time to tell the truth", you know it's time to tell more lies. And the rhetorical flourish "
are we ready to hear it?" is the way that notorious liars pretend that you can't handle their truth, which is another way of saying handle their lies...
It was a big splash, and the pond ran with the blurb for it yesterday, but now it was time to confront what the Murdochian 'leets really think is interesting copy, a bigot in his dotage trotting out lines from the 1930s ...
Right from the get go, that snap shows where we're headed. Why a snap of Aboriginal people playing football?
But then the pond remembered it wasn't going to argue, it was just going to slip in a few cartoons as a reminder of what it was missing out on by running this aged paean to bigotry and triumphalism ...
Well it's got more to say than an aged bigot wandering down memory lane ...
The pond had no intention of debating this peculiar form of whataboutism, the talk of how things are looking good, and ain't it grand to be level pegging with Bulgaria and rural Romania, because at this point the reptiles interrupted with their first snap, what now seems an almost obligatory picture of a smirking smug The Price is Wrong ...
The pond was still brooding about all the fun it was missing out on, as it saw people outside frolic and play, releasing krakens for a romp ...
Back to the grindstone and the grinding bigot ...
The pond had wondered when Gazza might wander in ... that's the Gazza that distinguished himself with
this contribution ...
The book, published last year, lists 16 Ways to Save Lives and Overcome Aboriginal Colonisation, which includes abolishing Welcome to Country at events and establishing a new day called Intermarriage Day.
“It is possible to test Aboriginal lineage,” wrote Johns, a former charity commissioner. “If the current three-part test on Aboriginality is to remain, then, just as Aborigines insist in native title claims, blood will have to be measured for all benefits and jobs.”
Victorian Labor senator Jana Stewart, a Mutthi Mutthi and Wamba Wamba woman, said “these are outdated views, from over 100 years ago”.
“They do not reflect 2023 Australia.”
Stewart said it was “up to the no campaign to explain whether they think the author’s views are acceptable and if not why does he remain on their campaign committee”.
In a speech at the CPAC conservative conference, Johns, the president of the anti-voice group Recognise a Better Way – which had been founded by Mundine – claimed some people in Indigenous communities lived in a “stupor” and recommended they “learn English”.
That's the company Warren of the Sydney Institute was keeping, but all the pond could think about was the fun it was missing ...
Perhaps a shorter gobbet might make the bigotry go down a bit easier ...
Nope, too depressing really, the colonial imperial mindset is as strong as it ever was and the pond keeps getting distracted from the fun ...
Say what? The knob only went up to 10?
But this knob knows how to go to 11 ...
So now the Stolen Generation exists and happened, but it was for their own good, and what fine maids they made and how nicely they worked for rations instead of wages ...
Why are the reptiles doing this? Why isn't there a gag order to hand?
On and on he droned, as complete a summary of colonial smugness as might be found, but as a reader noted, a change from the days when foreigners were going to ruin everything ...
He's got form alright, back to the days of
The Canberra Times, on 14th May 1984,
Trove here ...
Now the terrible dogs of racism are still being unleashed, thanks to the lizard Oz ...
Oh don't get the pond started on the 1999 referendum, cunningly constructed to keep the onion muncher a proud loyal subject of talking tampon King Chuck, and don't let the pond even begin to dwell on another referendum about the republic, supposedly to happen in an alleged second term. That's a dead duck quacking ...
And what happened to that gag?
On to the next bout with bigotry, and wouldn't you know it, the black armband gets a revival ...
They are often overlooked? Well that's true, in the sense that Blainey hasn't mentioned one of them, possibly doesn't know any of them, and wouldn't know what to write if he did ...
Why did the pond do all this? Why did the pond pound its head? Actually it's a familiar syndrome ...
Well enough already, the gavel is coming down on the last gobbet ...
And what opportunities might they be? Well those were once explained by Australia's best known and most qualified climate scientist here ...
Australia’s best-known historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, has challenged the idea that the current level of climate change is either unique or largely the result of human behaviour.
While agreeing the Earth was experiencing a warming period which had been under way for several decades, he said this in no way compared with much greater climate change in human history.
Professor Blainey, 89, the influential and sometimes controversial author of almost 40 books on Australian and world history, made plain he did not accept the overwhelming view of climate scientists that the changing climate required a unique, modern explanation limited to human behaviour.
He said human behaviour “may be part” of the reason for current global warming.
However, he said this did not explain how or why the climate had changed more dramatically in the past.
“The great period of climate change in Australia’s human history was in Aboriginal times, when the seas rose and cut off Tasmania and cut off New Guinea from Australia,” he said.
He added that ice-core samples from Antarctica had shown that as recently as 1173AD - the time of Francis of Assisi - had marked the start of a “horrible” 39-year drought.
“You have to be very careful that you’ve got good explanations for the past as well as for the present,” he said, in relation to climate change.
He was 89 then, and yet well into his dotage ...
And so to Polonius and his prattle. The pond has short-changed him this Sunday and dumped him down at the bottom like a load of offal or fish chunks, but it's such a familiar song, and because the ABC mucked up, it gives a little freshness to the chant, and does that shortcut key about there being no conservatives in the ABC get a work out or what...
Yes, yes, quite so, ABC, conservatives, lack of diversity, so on and so on, and quite so and so forth and etc., but the pond must do a white rabbit and get on. No cartoons, no dawdling, all that was done for the black armband man, and now the pond must do a white rabbit, look at its watch and scuttle away quickly...
The pond immediately regretted its cartoon ban. There was one that was done for Gym Jordan, but with a little imagination you could twist it into a reading of the Sydney Institute's quintessential empty suit ...
And then there was just a short gobbet to go ... and it goes without saying that Polonius failed to note all the learned judge's conclusions,
including but not limited to ...
...While Lee said that aspects of the ABC’s conduct were worthy of criticism and caused him concern, he was not satisfied this warranted an award of aggravated damages.
He said Russell “was no shrinking violet in drawing attention to himself” and the defamatory reports, and had “embraced the public controversy … and used it to further his personal causes and profile”.
Lee also said that Russell gave “false evidence, albeit on a somewhat peripheral matter” in the case, when he was questioned about a document he had given an ABC reporter researching a separate story on a different topic. This was relevant to the question of aggravated damages but not general compensatory damages, the judge said.
And so on to a standard triumphant gotcha closing line about the ABC Collective, for at least the zillionth time ...
Some days the pond wonders if it's right to promote the reptiles and pay attention to them.
Reptiles gunna bigot in the way bigoted reptiles do, and throwing a little sand at their faces is little more than the snipes of sandfly at the beach or a gadfly fixating on a horse's rump.
TT reminded the pond of the futility of it all as a way of closing out a depressing day ...
A concern troll, a decrepit “historian” who has spent the last few decades burrowing further and further down the rabbit-hole, and a cracked record (most likely a 78 RPM). Ah, the finest, most representative contemporary commentary that the Chairman’s money can buy - and not a ‘leet amongst them.
ReplyDeleteYou didn’t exaggerate, DP - that was an especially arduous slog. I’d like to say that it was worth it, but…….
ReplyDeleteIt surely was arduous, wasn't it. But whenever I read something like that, I always end up wondering whether the "Neds" of this world actually believe what they're spouting. In "Ned"'s case, I think he might be just idiot enough to do so.
DeleteBut of course it wasn't a matter of the competition of 'leets, it was much more an orchestrated outpouring of bigotry, hate and lies that over a period of weeks wore away the initial moderately positive view of the Voice (note capital V).
It's funny though how the reptiles ascribe so much difference to the level of education when there's now more degree holding university educated people - from all 'levels of life' - than ever before in Australia and yet somehow this difference in education is apparently so defining.
Yet most of the Reptiles probably have some form of tertiary education - but _they’re_ not over-educated ‘leets, no siree…..
Delete"Why a snap of Aboriginal people playing football?" Couldn't expect anybody who isn't a lifetime Melbournian to know that, but it has to do with the Aboriginal involvement with the 'Aussie Rules' game. Although Aboriginals did not actually invent Aussie Rules, a game that some of them played [marngrook] certainly affected it, and they were also early adopters:
ReplyDelete"As the AFL celebrates its annual Indigenous Round, Roy Hay and Athas Zafiris contend that the origins of Australian Rules were not, as often suggested, steeped in Indigenous culture – but that pioneering Aboriginal Australians nonetheless made the game their own."
https://indaily.com.au/sport/football/2017/05/26/indigenous-players-didnt-invent-australian-rules-made/#:~
Notwithstanding that, GB, the use of such a snap implies that in the Reptile worldview, playing footy is pretty much the highest level to which Indigenous Australians can aspire; or am I reading too much into it? Oh, of course they can also become Reptile-approved Indigenous “leaders” like Price and Mundine - the sort who don’t appear to actually have many Indigenous supporters.
ReplyDeleteNah, the "highest level to which Indigenous Australians can aspire" is actually a cricket tour of the UK, when an Aboriginal team did in 1868 (before any of us whiteys managed that). They lost, but apparently played very well just the same.
DeleteYes, Anon, it's all they can aspire to, and then a Nicky Winma comes along and ruins everything. It's a bit like the "equal opportunity" offered by Jimmy Sharman's boxing troupe, bashing up the local town drunks while getting racially vilified... unless as you say they can marry into the Sydney Institute ....
DeleteNow don't you go overlooking Sir Douglas Nicholls, DP. He started it all.
DeleteMy better half suggested that I should not spoil Ned’s day as he’s been saving up for this.
ReplyDelete“Power has shifted decisively to a professional, managerial, educated class that intends to use that power, a point readily understood by the voiceless majority”. Poor Paul. He and Rupert rendered voiceless by Coalition electoral defeats.
“Coalition seats were loyal and disciplined…”.
Well, yes, there aren’t many of them left.
One wonders, too, what “elite morality” actually is.
Given that Paul appears to think that all No voters were uneducated (as distinct from the “high-income earners, the professional class, people of influence and power and young people”), one wonders whether Paul’s doddering, poor, uneducated readers would understand the word “sophistry”. Far be it for Paul, Master of Letters from Melbourne University, to talk down to his readers.
Core values? I gather Tony Abbott has a list of the core values. Only trouble is, even his own party rejected them.
The big corporates are the enemies of the people? I seem to recall the conservatives once lauding them for employing large numbers of Australians. Still, the Murdoch empire is a big corporation promoting the “populist conservatives on the right”, so Paul could include himself amongst the enemies of the people.
“The idea is that they [financial and corporate businesses] should use their power to become agents of enlightened change – part of the unhealthy politicisation of nearly every aspect of society.”
Don’t tell Henry Ergas that enlightenment is now a dirty word; better to live in the Dark Ages, though I accept Henry may wish to return to ancient times.
Dorothy - thank you for those reminders that there is a world, not contained (indeed, not recognisable) in what appears in the Flagship. A spoonful of John Crace really does stimulate brain cells, even for some of us who have chosen to reside in Maranoa. Perhaps that will become known as Mara-No-Ah.
DeleteBut we should thank you also for the self-serving sludge from ‘Ned’ Kelly. It was worth picking over for gems like his citing David Brooks, who, Ned says, ‘captured the separate life and patronising outlook of US elite. While self-identifying with the class he criticised, Brooks said he had been previously naive in under-estimating how it became a ‘self-contained caste’ ‘.
OK - they don’t ‘do’ irony on the flagship (for this weekend they also parade Ms Ton-yee-nee, and I’m fairly sure I saw the Claire de Loon up there earlier) but this one from Ned is proof that ‘ya can’t make this stuff up’.
Charles Wright Mills wrote the book that set off current use of the term ‘elite’ - ‘The Power Elite’ - back in 1956, when Ned were a lad of 9, and Rupert was settling in his Adelaide ‘News’. One of Mills’ prophetic observations, at that time, was that ‘elites’ were moving from being local to being national - and the significant change in membership was because of ‘These national means of mass communications have been the channels through which those at the top could reach the underlying population. Heavy publicity, the technique of the build-up, and the avaricious demand of the media for continuous copy have placed a spotlight upon these people such as no higher circles of any nation in world history have had upon them.’
But that has escaped Ned - either from his own reading, or in moments of self-reflection. OK - I’m stretching it there - Ned, self reflection - nah.
Ned appears shocked and horrified at the thought that businesses might promote political and social issues. Despite well over 50 years covering politics, it has clearly never occurred to him that donations to parties and lobbying of politicians by those organisations might be motivated by a desire to influence policy? Naivety, senility - or just pompous hypocrisy?
DeleteAll three Anon, and in view of Chadders unveiling of the 'leets, possibly a few more. Wasn't Crace in good form ...
Delete“I don’t detect any great enthusiasm for Labour,” said Greg confidently. His finger unerringly on the pulse as ever. Er … let’s think this one through. There’s just been a swing of more that 20 percentage points to Labour and you think Labour have had a bad night. Because Labour would be really gutted that they had just won one seat – Mid-Beds – they had never previously held. You could just hear Keir Starmer. “This has been a bad night for Labour. We will go away and reflect on the result. And in the meantime we will concede the seat to the Tories as not as many people turned out to vote for us as we hoped.”
The Crace talent is that he has to deal with such abject mediocrities on the UK scene. Cartoonists and satirists in the USA have a torrent of truly loopy characters so they have to think hard about which one(s) to make their target each day, but Crace soars easily above the pathetically limited abilities of those who believe they are governing the land of Brexit.
Delete"back to the days of The Canberra Times, on 14th May 1984". Gracious, DP, a letter from the Right Honorable Al Grassby, no less.
ReplyDeleteI accidentally walked over Al a few weeks back. I was visiting the grave of a relative in the lawn section of Woden Cemetery, Canberra, happened to glance down at a few of the grave markers as I walked towards the one I was seeking and noticed that one of them was Al’s. It was a very simple and sedate little marker - quite unlike Al’s dress sense!
DeleteWhat? No commemorative tie?
DeleteProf Blainey: "...she [Jacinta] knows the so-called Stolen Generations were often Aboriginal children who had to be rescued for the sake of their own safety and welfare." Oh, and weren't they saved and welfared magnificently: all of them had very good schooling and a sizable percentage went on to acquire university degrees and even doctorates and became part of the well-to-do middle class. After all, isn't that where Jacinta hails from: the well-to-do upper middle class ?
ReplyDeleteBut what's really good is that hardly any of the whitey kids ever needed rescuing. Even now, apart from those kids in religious and government institutions that 'experienced' (we can't say "suffered", can we) from repetitive abuse, verbal, physical and sexual, so there was never a stolen White generation, was there.
So yes, there was a "stolen generation" (or two or three), but please, nobody tell The Bolter, it would disturb him horribly.
Continuing: "We can now see that the debate conducted during the past year was indirectly a clash about two conflicting views of this nation's history." Yeah, right: one view makes some attempt to reflect historical and present reality, the other is presented by Prof Blainey and his clique of agitpropists.
And so, Prof Blainey tells us "there are two different Australias." Only two, Prof ? Have you ever been to Lakemba, perhaps ? Amongst many other places - like the very Chinese parts of Melbourne, perhaps? Such as The Glen Shopping Mall and even Chadstone on a good day ? It is clear, I think, that Prof Blainey doesn't really know or understand much about Australia - other than his very Anglo-white middle-class environs, of course.
Oh, and I nearly forgot: Blainey: "Many viewers who at first sympathised with the prime Minister on television regretted that he did not congratulate the two Aboriginal leaders who especially defeated him."
DeleteNow isn't that just the most insufferable hypocrisy: congratulate them for their lies and unfailing bigotry. Did anybody actually catch any of those 'sympathetic viewers'? I certainly didn't.
That fear of “The Other” seemed to be a major driver of Blainey’s panic over non-white European immigration back in the mid-‘80s. From memory, that even extended to a horror of unfamiliar cooking odours wafting though the air. So yes, in Blainey’s mind the ideal is indeed to have only “One Australia” - an Anglocentric, overwhelmingly white-ish one.
DeleteThink Balney, Ned or the chairman and the lizard oz will last this long?
ReplyDelete"Challenging ideas
"Overall, the results of this study show that Lutruwita’s oral traditions involving a ‘Great South Star’ and a submerged land bridge could be confidently dated to a timeframe 12,000–14,000 years ago."
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-culture/2023/10/stories-told-by-aboriginal-tasmanians-could-be-oldest-recorded-in-the-world/
The climate does indeed vary over time - there was a genuine 'ice age' not so very long ago and once upon a time dinosaurs lived on Antarctica (despite the very long day and night). But the factor that none of the dim denialists ever mention is the time rate of change. Usually, climate changes over some number of millennia, not over centuries or even, as now, over decades.
DeleteIt takes something like the Chicxulub impactor or the Siberian Traps to bring on relatively rapid climate variation. And we don't have any of that now.
Ain't it curious the way the News/Sky pundits who spent months arguing the nation shouldn't be divided by race are now dividing the nation into sinister 'elite' yes voters and salt-of-the-earth no voters
ReplyDeleteTo state the obvious, your Oz commentariat aren't ordinary people. Ned, in his diatribe of about 2500 words, uses 'elite' 17 times! (on average, once every 140 words). Ordinary people don't talk like that.
ReplyDeleteJust for the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned in passing that the day's outpourings included a lot of 'same old same old' from Polonius. So, to give him due recognition:
ReplyDelete"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
Ecclesiates 1:9
So be it.