In which the pond offers a thought for the day, and no thought at all from the lizard Oz ...

 

Thought for the day: Man is the Religious Animal ... He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his bother's path to happiness and heaven. Mark Twain.

Whatever happened to those desk calendars? Long ago the pond worked for a place which provided desk calendars, which flipped over each day, and which provided diligent worker bees with the date and an uplifting quote. There's probably an app to hand to do the job these days, but it's another thing vulgar youff has missed out on ... and not likely to provoke the weird nostalgia that besets LPs and 8 tracks ... and Philips cassettes, and lord forgive them, the pond's ancient reel to reel Akai ...

One thing only silly members of the vulgar youff class would do is fork over cash to Chairman Emeritus Rupert so they could catch Jack the Insider going off ...

...The point is that many young adults – we could call them the Great Thunberg generation – have been brow beaten into a deep state of fear by material from doomsayers like Jancovici at such a profound level that the post-adolescent urge to cut the familial cord and travel the world has been actively suppressed. Life is hard but it’s not as if the planet is going to glow orange and burst into flames even in their lifetimes.
It’s not the fault of the young. They are merely victims of a grim inculcation. Climate change offers all manner of destructive calamities both seen and understood or unforeseen and vaguely predictable, but being repeatedly warned of an eminent global Armageddon is bound to have a profound collective psychological effect that leads to a joyless nihilism not unlike the one members of previous generations experienced enduring the sabre rattling of the nuclear superpowers.
This remains a live, if severely diminished, threat in the post-Cold War era, Russian threats of limited tactical nuclear strikes in Ukraine and the nuclear ambitions of a North Korean man-child notwithstanding. Oh, and the mullahs in Iran.
Back when we were in the Gen Z’s shoes we learned to deal with the prospect of impending existential oblivion. US President Ronald Reagan, who despised nuclear weapons and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev ran a red line through hundreds of nuclear warheads. Sting sang a song, and we got through it.

That's the reason vulgar youff getz pissed off by old farts. So pleased with themselves, so complacent, so self-satisfied, there's an understandable desire to wipe the smirk off their dial, give the smug moosh spouting platitudes about 'in my day' a whack across the chops or dose of castor oil ... or maybe a one way ticket to Ukraine, so that Jack and other old farts can sit in a war zone and sing along with Sting, and get through it ...

Speaking of old farts, it is of course our Henry day ... and sure enough there he was on the top far right of the digital edition ...

Of course being on about the Voice immediately put the old bigot in red card territory, but in any case the reptiles had sprung a surprise on the pond. 

As well as bleating about doling out cash in the Pacific, Lloydie of the Amazon made his return to gravely discuss the matter ...

Some might wonder why Lloydie had gone MIA when there was recent talk of records, as in this AP story ...September sizzled to records and was so much warmer than average scientists call it 'mind-blowing'

After a summer of record-smashing heat, warming somehow got even worse in September as Earth set a new mark for how far above normal temperatures were, the European climate agency reported Thursday.
Last month’s average temperature was 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average for September. That's the warmest margin above average for a month in 83 years of records kept by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“It’s just mind-blowing really,” said Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo. “Never seen anything like that in any month in our records.”
While July and August had hotter raw temperatures because they are warmer months on the calendar, September had what scientists call the biggest anomaly, or departure from normal. Temperature anomalies are crucial pieces of data in a warming world.
“This is not a fancy weather statistic,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto said in an email. “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems. It destroys assets, infrastructure, harvest.”
Copernicus calculated that the average temperature for September was 16.38 degrees Celsius (61.48 degrees Fahrenheit), which broke the old record set in September 2020 by a whopping half-degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit). That's a huge margin in climate records...

And so on, but back to Lloydie, back in action and setting the tone with a snap ...

Could cost Anthony Albanese billions of dollars? Yep, that's what it said. Who knew that Albo was personally going to fork over billions?

Beyond the grammatical pedantry came this ...

That talk of coal exports is heresy, and so the reptiles slipped in a pacifying snap of a unifier making the universal gesture of Xian love ...

Then it was on to another, alarmingly short burst from Lloydie ...

That's it? That's all he typed?.What a fizzer, what a damp squib of a return ...

Then came further problems for the Catholic Boys' Daily with Tess reporting on the thoughts of that dangerously radical Pope infesting the Vatican ... with idle talk designed to produce consternation, or perhaps even heart attacks in the reptile flock ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, what can the faithful reptiles do with this sort of nonsense?

Thought for the day: What God lacks is convictions - stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something - not try to be everything. Mark Twain.

On and on Tess trudged, reporting on the alarming thoughts of this dangerous heretic ...

The pond almost fainted clean away - what on earth could the Catholic Boys' Daily do with this sort of pious nonsense? - but picked itself up to see what was on offer in the comments section ...

Hmm, there was The Mocker, some anonymous wretch carrying on in the style of anon bloggers, still incapable of letting go of Dictator Dan, an echo of lost reptile golden days ...

Luckily Robert French was cancelled out by the meretricious Merritt, who knows much more about the law than some useless Frenchy, but as the pond has voted, red cards for both of them ...

On a slow day, the pond might have spared some time for the misinformation reliably peddled by Mirko, but the pond had to acknowledge the thoughts of cackling Claire, expert climate science denialist and epidemiologist, taking note of the doings of the dynamite mob ...

Another classic reptile illustration from the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department ... and another short gobbet ...

During the course of the column, the reptiles managed to yoke together two disparate sights ...

Meanwhile, Claire had to deal with the anti-vax mob lurching in from Faux Noise and the far right...

Claire topped off this cackle with "historically, anti-vax stances have been associated with the far left."

The pond hesitated before breaking Godwin's Law yet again, but then the pond came across a piece by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler ...

Sorry, the pond stands corrected. Of course the Nazis were socialists and therefore far leftists ...

And there was the pond's hearty laugh for the day, what with cackling Claire talking of political tribalism ... while scribbling for the lizard Oz, as good an example of political tribalism as the country has, with the noble exception of Sky after dark ...

And speaking of tribalism, the pond decided to give the old bigot a bit of a canter, but only after a careful neutering our Henry, so that his blather about the Voice has been restricted to his usual pompous, portentous set of humbug historical references ... and been kept to the bottom of the page where no-one will see him or care ... 

It would be too simple for the old bigot just to urge a "no" vote because of the need to keep the fuzzy wuzzies in their place, or feel some cold dinkum Victorian steel up 'em... so instead the lizard Oz readership copped this kind of humbug ...

...None of that would have surprised the great thinkers who shaped our understanding of liberal democracy, such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Although wary of monopolies and cartels, they regarded trade and commerce, which is based on openly selfish calculation, as plainly desirable; but they also emphasised the need to curb private interests when they invade the public sphere.

“Political writers have established it as a maxim,” wrote Hume, “that in contriving any system of government, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.” 

The solution, Hume argued, did not lie in a pointless quest to populate politics with angels; it lay in designing institutions that tempered the risks, including by ensuring no voice was favoured over others on the battlefield of public affairs.

The immediate issue was the right to an equal say in public consultation, notably in petitioning parliament. Clause 5 of the 1689 Bill of Rights declared “That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal”; but restrictions on “humble petitioning” imposed in 1661 had not been entirely repealed.

It took the crusades against sectional interests waged by the antislavery league, the campaign to repeal the taxes on corn and the Chartists before the “equality of voice” that arises from the right of all British men and women to petition parliament was unquestionably recognised in 1853.

The need to curb sectional interests arose even more acutely in the context of parliamentary representation. In 1867, the Colonial Office had approved reserving four parliamentary seats for Maori in New Zealand as a reward to the tribal chiefs who had sided with the Crown in the blood-soaked Maori wars; however, British opinion staunchly opposed the formal representation of sectional interests in the House of Commons.

Thus, in his influential Essays on Reform, Albert Venn Dicey, the Victorian era’s pre-eminent constitutionalist, argued that instead of deliberating upon the public good, any group’s “special representatives” would believe that there was “something sacred in defending at all costs their own interests”: the result would be “incalculable evils”, as “the most fanatical, the most narrow” minds, ardent only in the pursuit of their own advantage, turned politics into an exercise in grabbing other people’s income.

That tussle was not an exercise in “dividing a pie”; more like a brawl in a porcelain shop, it destroyed whatever there was to share.

Those dangers have hardly disappeared; and it is beyond doubt that howls of protest would quite rightly have greeted a proposal to bestow on miners, bankers or farmers an exclusive, constitutionally entrenched right to make representations to parliament and executive government, with the privilege being denounced as a right to pillage the public till.

But if those howls of protest, which one would have expected the left to unleash, have been so muted in the case of the voice, it is because our zeitgeist is permeated by a particularly patronising version of the myth of the Noble Savage, in which innocence, victimhood and disinterestedness stand entirely on one side and culpability, cupidity and power entirely on the other.

Marc Lescarbot, the French lawyer and pioneering ethnographer who, after living among Canada’s Mi’kmaq Indians, somewhat ironically coined the term “the Noble Savage” in 1609, knew better. Precisely because he regarded the Indians as human beings, inherently no better or worse than others, he was convinced they “have no want of wit”, with their chiefs understanding every bit as well as their French counterparts how to be “subtle, thievish, and traitorous”. 

Lescarbot is hardly alone in refusing to treat Indigenous peoples as mere victims; just listing the contemporary scholars who have shown the crucial role Indigenous “agency” has played in shaping outcomes would easily fill this column.

Historically, that role was constrained by a crippling power asymmetry; but those days are long gone. And just as it makes no sense to whitewash the past, so it would be absurd – and blatantly inconsistent with “truth-telling” – to deny that the Indigenous administrative and managerial class has been instrumental in the conception, delivery and, yes, repeated failure of the policies intended to “close the gap”...

The old bigot topped that off with a closing reference ...

Australians are a weird mob. As WK Hancock famously put it in Australia (1930), while “generally matter-of-fact people who distrust fine phrases and understand hard realities, in politics they have been incurable romantics”. “Fond of ideals and impatient of techniques, their sentiments quickly find phrases, and their phrases find prompt expression in policies” – policies that allow “swarms of petty interests” to harm those they purport to help. 

The pond can't believe it's going to quote a note in Reddit in relation to the matter of Hancock, but can't be bothered doing any more research, so here it is ...

And with that, and our Henry's economical tear wiped away, and this immortal Rowe, the pond is done for the day ...