In which the reptiles offer a full dose of angertainment, and the pond experiences a deep nausea ...

 

Yesterday The Mocker put to bed the rumour that the dog botherer was the Mocker ... unless it was a guest Mocker, because who knows with these anonymous reptiles, way worse than those deviant anon bloggers. 

Or maybe the dog botherer is a double dealing Janus, willing to pretend he's in favour of the Voice, but then undercover of darkness willing to walk on the wild side and ravage supporters of a 'leet folly. Anything's possible, and maybe the dog botherer took a sadistic pleasure in ravaging himself, a bit like those priests who exude rectitude and then are caught out having fun with BDSM ...

Whatever, though the pond did shed a tear for poor old Tom Keneally scribbling away under his own name in The Graudian.

It seems he's only recently become a herpetologist and discovered what baleful, monstrous sort sof creatures they are, inclined to go Rogue and in a way far worse than the tame CGI croc in that old movie.

I mourn the loss of Australia’s Indigenous voice vote – and won’t forgive the media’s mendacity

They don't care about your forgiveness Tom. That's a Catholic concept. Mendacity is the way they make their living. They thrive on hate, fear and loathing, so your words are like cream to a cat, or perhaps an unthinking 'roo to a croc:

...in the months since, news organisations that also, through the recklessness of our politicians at various stages of history, own television stations, spread grotesque stories about what the Aboriginal advisory body would do in practice. The Murdoch press and others raised fantastical propositions about what the powers of the body would be. I met people who were sincerely confused. We always thought that one day prime minister, Anthony Albanese, would sit us down and explain the essence of the voice and the limits of its power in transparent and unarguable English. For whatever reason, this never seemed to happen. His minister for Aboriginal affairs, Linda Burney, of the strong and influential Wiradjuri tribe, bravely did what she could, but says she spent all her time battling the latest Murdoch press fable.

You might have won the Booker Tom, but all that means is that you're a part of a dangerous 'leet, a too clever by half ponce giving yourself airs and graces above your station, a tall poppy right for reptile takedown syndrome...

They've been doing it for years to all sorts of people and all sorts of issues, the more regressive and retrograde the more they like the doing ...

Here's the lizard Oz editorialist today Tom, busy dishing up the angertainment ... pretending unity is badly needed, then letting loose the hounds of division ...

Here's the thing. After the referendum, the reptiles urged everyone to ignore race. Yet suddenly there's an urgent need to persecute Aboriginal people with a Royal Commission and an audit. 

If we're supposed to be colour blind, why not have a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in all rural communities? Heck, the pond would be proud for Tamworth to be offered up as a fit object for study ... why, an audit of Barners' sex life and boondoggles would be a bonus ...

It goes without saying that the current stunts are simply designed to whip up outrage and serve the needs of the reptile angertainment machine. 

An esteemed correspondent urged the pond to take a look at an old piece by the savvy Savva, (only a soft paywall), once a regular feature on these pages, and she did indeed talk about the Price is Wrong ...

...When we spoke a few days ago, Wyatt was as unsurprised as he was unimpressed by Dutton’s conduct of the No campaign in the referendum.

Wyatt dismissed the fevered commentary about Jacinta Nampijinpa Price becoming prime minister. He reckons for a leader to succeed, she – or he – must be capable of, and be seen to be working for, all Australians. He believes neither Dutton nor Price has shown they can do that.

Going down in history as two of the people most responsible for destroying a referendum which Wyatt is convinced would help Indigenous people is no qualification for national leadership in Wyatt’s view.

Born on a mission station to a mother who was forced to hand over her wages to bureaucrats then ask for money back to buy essentials, Wyatt was the first Indigenous person to become Indigenous affairs minister under Scott Morrison. He quit the Liberal Party in protest in April.

Clinging to hope that Yes would triumph, Wyatt worried defeat would deter future governments from considering new approaches. He accepts Anthony Albanese would have no mandate to legislate a Voice but pledged he and fellow Yes warriors would not give up fighting for better ways to address Indigenous disadvantage.

In the post-mortems which will inevitably continue for decades, we can and we will blame No campaigners for playing filthy dirty, for putting politics above everything else, for using loudhailers to whistle up the neo-Nazis, racists and bigots with lies and misrepresentations.

The demons unleashed by tactics to foment conflict, for short term political gain at the expense of vulnerable Australians, will live on long after Saturday’s vote.

And again ...

..The Noes blame Yes for dividing Australia, which is a bit like claiming black is white. They claim it’s the biggest change to the Constitution ever proposed. Wrong. That was the republic. Their most potent argument against that was if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Those same people, notably Tony Abbott, know this system is broken, offer no solution and instead seek to destroy the Voice by claiming it will encourage “separatism.”

As if such a modest change to set up an advisory body creates a new apartheid. Confronted by tough questioning, they scream bias. In fact, they have had a good run. Too good.

As the most prominent, the most effective and most polarising participant in the black-on-black conflict, Price has called the shots for the Coalition. She says up front what many of them think but few dare to say. The photo of Price acting as barista in a Perth cafe with Dutton smiling awkwardly behind her like a mobile coffee caddy, says it all.

Not only has she given white folk an excuse to vote no, she has absolved them of any guilt or shame for past wrongs by insisting colonisation had benefited Aboriginal people. Read David Marr’s excellent book Killing for Country and judge for yourself.

Another of the many low points of this campaign was when the media and others perversely condemned Indigenous leader Marcia Langton for calling out racism, rather than condemn the racism itself. We live in dangerous times when Ray Martin cops more abuse from the Noes for using words like dinosaurs and dickheads than does a neo-Nazi who threatens to kill a senator.

Dutton questioning the integrity of an institution as highly regarded as the Australian Electoral Commission was inexcusable. It opened the door wide for conspiracy theorists to harass and abuse the commission and its staff.

This is a defining moment for Australia. Almost every other country on earth has reached an accommodation with its original inhabitants. We should at least be honest enough to admit that if we don’t, this debate will have simply exposed what lurks just beneath the surface. Blaming Albanese for that is bizarre. Ultimately, responsibility for the result and everything which delivers it resides with us.

But that lets the reptiles off lightly. Their words and deeds should also be remembered ... but the savvy Savva did get it right ... it would get worse ...

Now the onion muncher wants to ban the Aboriginal flag? And the lizard Oz editorialist cynically deplores the division that is difficult to contain? 

But who hosts the onion muncher's divisive cries? Why the lizard Oz and here the pond must return to the start to show the onion muncher boldly on parade ...

There's the hole in the bucket man off on the far right, and down below there was the onion muncher smirking in his usual way, and next to him was the Price getting it wrong yet again ...

This day's angertainment offering certainly worked. The pond had so much anger that it could only dish out small portions of the onion muncher's offering. Anyone wanting more will have to deploy a paywall breaking app to get it ...

Here's the flag-banning bit, wrapped up in identity politics ...

...Meanwhile, if the people’s vote is to be respected, it should mean abandoning, or at least scaling back, recent concessions to separatism: such as flying the Aboriginal flag co-equally with the national one (as if Australia is a country of two nations) and the routine acknowledgement of country by all speakers at official events (as if those whose ancestry here stretches beyond 1788 are more Australian than everyone else).

There’ll be an understandable tendency not to further upset those dismayed by the result; but it’s actually people’s polite acquiescence in what’s known to be wrong and fear of giving offence to previously discriminated-against minorities that’s allowed identity politics to become so entrenched, such that what was self-evident a generation ago now attracts trigger warnings or worse. If the separatist practices that most voters were reacting against persist, regardless of the voice’s thumping rejection, disillusionment with mainstream politics can only deepen.

In the immediate aftermath of the vote, the international reaction was of one pained surprise that Australians had somehow rejected rights for Aboriginal people, rather than just special ones. This simply shows the global pervasiveness of identity thinking – due to the left’s long march through the institutions – and reveals how seismic our vote could be; provided we appreciate the magnitude of what we’ve just done and have the self-confidence to build upon it.

Tony Abbott was the 28th prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.

Do we need to be reminded that he was the worst prime minister in living memory? 

The reptiles were determined to put him and the mutton Dutton in the same huge photo camp, possibly hoping that soon we'd have a new contender for the prize of worst prime minister in living memory...

 

If the pond had the ability, it would have reduced those snaps to the size of gnats ...

There was also this from the onion muncher ...

...To its proponents, it was an atonement for the British settlement of the Australian landmass from 1788, and a way to overcome the intergenerational trauma colonialism had allegedly engendered. It says something about the robust common sense of most Australians that 60 per cent-plus voted no; and something about the dispossession-angst of many that nearly 40 per cent voted yes, including quite a few, such as Father Frank Brennan, who felt obligated that way despite all the flaws in what was proposed. 

What’s clearly happening now, though, is an attempt to de-legitimise the result by claiming that it was due to “misinformation” and what’s clearly evident is the government’s inclination to carry on as if the vote had never happened. The reaction of some businesses to the vote was to offer their staff stress leave and to insist they’d been right actively to support the Yes campaign even though it was way beyond their normal remit and must have been at odds with the position of many of their employees and customers. 

As with Brexit, the indications are that the left-establishment will do its best to subvert and sabotage a vote it regards as morally deficient and try to nullify its effect. On a whole range of issues, such as climate, gender and immigration, there’s a disconnect between an empowered minority, with a tendency to regard dissent as not just wrong but immoral, and all those citizens who are much more pragmatic but whose only say is their vote. In an era when Labor and Liberal MPs seem to have more in common with each other than with the people who vote for them, the challenge for democracy is to ensure voting still makes a difference. 

Because the voice offended both the liberal principle of constitutional equality and the conservative instinct not to embark on speculative change, the support for the voice of numerous Coalition MPs shows the intellectual diffidence still gripping the centre-right. But Peter Dutton’s brave decision to oppose it, despite the polls at the time, shows courage and conviction can be politically vindicated. His challenge now will be to insist on a full policy reset, when the government next changes...

Ye ancient scalded cats, Brexit ... what was it the savvy Savva said?

...In the post-mortems which will inevitably continue for decades, we can and we will blame No campaigners for playing filthy dirty, for putting politics above everything else, for using loudhailers to whistle up the neo-Nazis, racists and bigots with lies and misrepresentations.

The demons unleashed by tactics to foment conflict, for short term political gain at the expense of vulnerable Australians, will live on long after Saturday’s vote.

Yep, ban the flag, call for a united nation, then devise royal commissions and audits as a way to persecute them and maintain the rage ...

As for the rest of the divisive rabble, there were slim pickings ...

They were still holding on to the braying Mocker early on a Friday? Is it really the dog botherer biting his own hind leg?

Unfortunately the pond also refused to go there with the hole in the bucket man ... sounding even worse than the lizard Oz editorialist, crying out for the killing fields in the midst of a humanitarian calamity ...

The pond could only stand a few quick bursts ...

...Only one word can describe these people: evil. To use the term may seem as anachronistic as speaking of abomination, uncleanness or iniquity. Even the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “evil” has been “commonly superseded, in familiar speech, by “bad”. But exactly as we know good from bad, so we can differentiate evil from ordinary wickedness – and this was it.

“Radical evil”, thought Immanuel Kant, is ultimately incomprehensible: to explain human action, he argued, is to appeal to good reasons; and there can never be good reasons for murdering babies, mutilating toddlers and disfiguring the dead. However, even if we can’t make that evil intelligible, we can capture its essence: the denial of the victims’ humanity. 

The pond did it for the Kant reference, what with the irony of our Henry full of outrage and cant.

What about indulging in a full-blown apartheid and creating a huge open air prison camp, along the lines of ancient gulags and ghettoes? Somehow this cartoon felt apt for some obscure reason ...

Never mind, in due course, post-Kant cant and killing fields rage, the hole in the bucket man led with a gigantic billy goat butt ...

...To say that is not to ignore the conflict’s complexities. But in the charnel house of history, the great horrors always come in media res – in the midst of longstanding and ongoing grievances and disputes. Those grievances and disputes can no more wash away Hamas’s slaughter of the innocent than Germany’s resentment about the Treaty of Versailles can justify the Holocaust. And even less can they erase the fact that Hamas, having made the conflict into a total, existential, war, must bear the consequences. 

As those consequences unfold, there will, no doubt, be ever louder calls from Hamas’s supporters for an immediate ceasefire. “Every aggressor,” wrote the great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “is a lover of peace: he wants his aggression to go unopposed; but to prevent aggression, we must fight.” And fight Israel will, by whatever means suit it best, until it has achieved its objectives – no matter how many of the Islamists’ useful idiots burn Israeli flags and chant anti-Semitic slogans. 

It goes without saying that by bringing in the Nazis and Carl, the hole in the bucket man just did his level best to ignore the conflict's complexities ... as cant-filled humbug who can't contemplate complexities must do ...

The reptiles helped by offering up snaps of Babi Yar and Hannah ... possibly because they came cheap from the stock shot library ...

 

There was also this from the hole in the bucket man to justify the Hannah snap ...

...Grotesque celebrations of terrorism, those demonstrations exemplify what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. She certainly didn’t mean, by calling this form of evil “banal”, to cast it as trivial, any more than did her mentor, German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who originated the concept; on the contrary, both considered it especially dangerous.

It is precisely the horrifying “everyday thoughtlessness” of those Pontius Pilates that Arendt tried to capture in her famous phrase; and it is precisely because not thinking is so easy and so comfortable that it threatens, “like a fungus, to devastate reality by laying waste to its surface”.

Little wonder then that the religion-hating Greens, who epitomise the wingless generation’s moral confusion, have linked arms with Islamic fundamentalists who would, if only they could, crucify gays, behead transsexuals and force women into the perpetual darkness of illiteracy, childhood marriages and burqas. 

That's the point at which the pond snapped. The lizard Oz has been the home for much TG abuse, and intermittently sundry other bigots, not limited to the onion muncher ...

The pond sometimes feels guilt and shame at spreading reptile angertainment. Where for example might the pond find an article in the lizard Oz about Jewish fundamentalism?

You have to head off to the likes of Haaretz to help understand why during recent times Covid swept through fundamentalist Jewish communities, adopting a Killer Creighton approach to the science (it's here in the Wayback Machine for those who can't get past the soft paywall)

...Take the relationship between Judaism and the sciences. Haredi-Fundamentalist Jews reject science except when scientific discovery supports their understanding of the Bible. For Haredi-Fundamentalist Jews, God’s Torah is flawless, the revealed word of a perfect God (Psalm 19:8). They believe that if science contradicts Torah, then science has made the error. For example, in the Haredi-Fundamentalist view, the world is only 5,772 years old. Archaeologists using carbon dating, however, have uncovered dinosaur fossils over 200 million years old. Seeing this apparent contradiction, some Haredi-Fundamentalist Jews argue that God has put dinosaur fossils in the ground simply to test our faith.

As for gays, there's the old testament to consider, and here the pond went off to the wiki for an extended discussion of Jewish views on homosexuality ...

...While a variety of views regarding homosexuality as an inclination or status exist within the Orthodox Jewish community, Orthodox Judaism generally prohibits homosexual conduct. While there is some disagreement about which male homosexual acts come under core prohibitions, the majority of Orthodox Judaism puts male-male anal sex in the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor, "die rather than transgress", the small category of Biblically-prohibited acts (also including murder, idolatry, adultery, and incest) which an Orthodox Jew is obligated under the laws of Self-sacrifice under Jewish Law to die rather than do. According to the Talmud, homosexual acts are forbidden between non-Jews as well, and this is included among the sexual restrictions of the Noachide laws. The archetypal model in Judaism is marital heterosexuality with fornication, celibacy, adultery, homosexuality, incest and bestiality seen to be part of a continuous prism of wrong.

And so on ... and as for women's rights, don't get the pond started. 

At one point, the pond went on a jag watching assorted documentaries about women suddenly discovering the world outside their fundamentalist oppressive communities. It wasn't just the four parter on Netflix ... there were all kinds of stories ... take it away PBS ...

...CHANI GETTER: When I tell people that I grew up 30 miles north of New York, that I went into the city and I had never seen a movie before I was in my 20s, they think I’m insane.

SEVERSON: Chani Getter grew up, married and had three children before she broke away from her Hasidic community. Those who leave Hasidism paint a picture of a very puritanical and sheltered way of life.

GETTER: When I left, I moved into my own apartment and I started driving, and as a woman who was driving, my parents disowned me. In our sect, women did not drive. And so, for eight years, they didn’t talk to me.

SEVERSON: In Hebrew, the word Hasidim translates to mean the “pious ones.” They are defined by their devotion to a hereditary leader known as the “Rebbe”, by their distinctive clothing and Yiddish language. Professor Samuel Heilman is a Jewish scholar at Queens College.

PROFESSOR SAMUEL HEILMAN: They have everything that makes up a culture, social norms, language, a career pattern in life. Even the ones who leave say that there are aspects of their lives that they left behind that they miss. To go to a Hasidic gathering and to sing the songs and to dance in the circle and to be enfolded into the community, and to hear your voice in a chorus of other voices. This is a tremendously exciting experience and when you leave and you’re all alone, all alone in the city…

SEVERSON: Professor Heilman says there are as many as 350 thousand Hasidic Orthodox in the U.S. and Canada, and an even larger population in Israel. And the numbers are increasing fast, he says, because Hasidism strongly encourages very large families.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: They don’t believe in birth control. They believe that the commandment of “be fruitful and multiply” is incumbent upon all Jewish people and they practice it. Not only do they have large families but they are the poorest of all Jews because they don’t go to college, so they lack often some of the skills that are necessary for high income. They are all literate in Jewish education, but their secular education is limited. That is not to say there are not some who are successful…in the diamond business, electronics business, in trading on Wall Street.

SEVERSON: Relatively few leave, in professor Heilman’s view, because they’ve been taught to shun the secular world.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: They’ve been told that the world outside their own is demonic, corrosive, dangerous, they wouldn’t want to be part of it, that they live a superior kind of life.

GETTER: One of the things that they teach you is that we get to choose what we allow our eyes to see. We get to choose what we allow our ears to hear. And so when you go into the city, you make a conscious choice not to allow your eyes to see.

FEUERWERKER: There’s this whole, like belief or narrative in the community that if you, if you try to break away or change you will fail and you won’t be happy and you’ll just end up on drugs.

The point being that there are all kinds of barking mad fundamentalists out there in the world ... not just Islamic - don't get the pond started - but also Catholic, Jewish and Hindu, and that's just for starters, before we get on to Tom Cruise or the cult of the mango Mussolini ...

It turns out that the hole in the bucket man is also a barking mad fundamentalist, eager to let loose the dogs of war and savour the killing fields ...

...Israel will survive these idiots, as it has survived so much else. Judaism’s fundamental principle is that of obligation: its ethic is based on the duty to give, never on the right to take. It holds to no sweeping claim that good will triumph, that its countless martyrs will enjoy eternal bliss or that the righteous will conquer the Earth.

But just as the secular, democratic state of Israel is founded on the overriding imperative of “mamlakhiyut”, or civic responsibility, so the Jewish tradition vests in each person the absolute obligation to protect this world of ours from evil. With evil, chemically pure, once again unleashing the furies of death and destruction, that is our duty too.

No, it's not a secular, democratic state. It's a theocracy and currently the far right fundamentalists and bigots are in charge, and all that secular Jews and the likes of Haaretz can do is rail against them ...

The pond had been made so angry by all this angertainment that it needed a chaser, something to bring things back to something approaching equilibrium. What better way to do it than a serve of the bro?

It helps that as usual the bro is as mad as hell and gone to the window to yell that he can't take it anymore, so the pond can simply sit back and enjoy the spectacle ...

Ah the cunning Yanks, butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, what with all the flattery, and that Joe bunging on the charm ...

The pond could at last take it easy and run that infallible Pope ...

Uh oh, anger rising, must take another bro red pill ...

"Impactful projection"? Oh that's right, the bro's war on China by Xmas, and the need for impactful verbiage ...

Still the pond felt settled enough to run the immortal Rowe of the day ...

Uh oh, anger rising again, must take another bro red pill ...

Say what, the reptiles also realised the need for a visual break and slipped in a snap of the worst defence minister ever and a bit of kit designed to placate the bro?

Forget the visuals, the pond needs that red pill fix ...

Bowdlerised? Like reading books in the deep south in the US? Relax, can't go there, the bro was only linking to himself, as fluff-gathering navel-gazers are wont to do ...

It put the pond in such good humour, all this ranting and railing and shouting at clouds that the pond thought it could go another cartoon ...

Uh oh, the pond has overdone the cartoons, must have another bro fix. 

What's that, there's only one gobbet to go? But the pond was just starting to feel normal again, with a reptile doing the shouting, and the pond just watching on, because there's nothing more entertaining than a red-faced bromancer shouting at clouds...

Sheesh, the bromancer's war with China by Xmas is looking sickly again ...

But the pond can't just do a cold hard turkey exit. The pond has been keeping up with the Americans, and they certainly aren't fools ... and here's a couple of closing cartoons to prove it ...