A spartan summer school for herpetology students ...

 

I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format

Well yes, though the pond's itch would disappear the moment that News Corp imploded (exploded will also do).

Now to the set studies for summer school herpetology students ...

Exercise 1:

In view of this scientifically impeccable study, explain in less than a 100 words, why both John Banville and John Gray are fuckheads, Gray for making the argument, and Banville for quoting it approvingly, in Back to the State of Nature in the NYRB's December 21, 2023 issue (possible paywall).

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

...Gray’s new Leviathans are not all coherent, centralized political regimes. In the book’s final chapter, “Mortal Gods,” he tackles, with a keen focus, the thorny topic of what has come to be known under the general heading of “woke.” Gray sees this movement—if so diverse and heterogeneous a phenomenon can be called a movement—which has been dreamed up and promoted by “hyper-liberals” who constitute the present-day “antinomian intelligentsia,” as providing “an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.” It is also, however, on the secular level, “a revolt of the professional bourgeoisie.” As late capitalism delivers more and more of the world’s wealth into the hands of a very few plutocrats, many middle-class professionals—“university professors, media figures, lawyers, charity workers, community activists and officers in non-governmental organizations”—find their earnings dwindling and their status in society deteriorating.
The result of this crisis is a scramble for the positions and powers that used to be the birthright of an educated elite. Now there are more elites than Western economies can cope with, absorb, or sufficiently reward. In this milieu, being woke is a wise career move: “By advertising their virtue, redundant graduates hope to gain a foothold on the crumbling ladder that leads to safety as one of society’s guardians.”

Students who fail to make mention of "virtue" and its relationship to "virtue signalling" in their essay will be marked down. Students who note the use of "leet" by fuckheads who clearly imagine they are 'leet can stop at this exercise and go fishing.

Students who wonder what happened to the NYRB will be encouraged to do post-graduate studies.

Exercise 2:

This is a free form exercise. Students must imagine the state of desperation of the woman described in this piece and evoke her despair, and her sense of liberation and freedom when it's all over. 

Poetry, a novella, a short story, or an essay are all acceptable forms.

What my first love taught me about the Left: they imagine better worlds while creating worse ones

By timothy lynch

5:00AM December 28, 2023

The first woman I ever loved was an eco-feminist. She was radicalised by the 1984 British miners’ strike, listened to Billy Bragg on a C90 cassette tape, marched for women’s rights, admired communist East Germany and refused on principle to visit the US. In the 33 years since she dumped me, I don’t think she ever has.

In those decades, the left of which she was a proud and, I thought, typical member has been transformed.

Barbara (name changed) would now march not to keep coalmines open but to close them. Bragg would be too old/white male/working class (and thus need decolonising). The women’s rights marches Barbara joined in the 1980s she would now condemn as anti-trans. Only her anti-Americanism – the second most durable hatred on the left, after anti-Semitism – would endure.

The right has switched, too. Not as completely as the left but in important ways we often elide. This transposition of left and right conditions much of our contemporary politics but goes mostly unremarked.

In the ’80s, the Conservatives effectively closed the British coal industry. Barbara sent the picketing men blankets and goodwill. Today, “beautiful, clean coal” (Don­ald Trump’s phrase) is deified by those on the right. It speaks to man’s independence from the forces of cold nature. Scott Morrison held aloft a lump in parliament.

In the 2020s, it is the left that has assumed the four-decade-old Conservative position.

In Australia, Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen vilify coal. Like Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor, Thatcher’s head of the National Coal Board, Labor is plotting to throw every miner out of work.

Then, the right stood for middle-class values: marriage, family, low taxation, strong defences. Now, Australian Liberals trade on their working-class bona fides. In the US, Republicans tell defenestrated coalminers that they will be their voice. Democrats blame them for climate change. Barbara wept with the injustice of Thatcher’s assault on mining communities. Hillary Clinton now derides them as deplorables.

The right stood against the sexual revolution, free love and the consequences of the pill. Now it is the left that polices sex. Brittany Higgins, a young conservative woman (at least until Network Ten got to her), has become a poster child of the left’s obsession with sexual misconduct. The sex re-education programs on every university campus, warning of the perils of physical intimacy, are mandated by progressives, not by conservatives.

It used to be the religious right that told us to avoid sex. Now it is the cultural left. It was conservatives who criticised feminism. Now it is trans activists on the left. Indeed, it is Liberal women (such as Moira Deeming) who have paid the highest price for upholding a traditional conception of women’s rights. Many left-wing feminists have gone missing in action.

The left-right transposition is especially evident when it comes to race. It was small-C conservatives (often southern Democrats) in the US who wanted to maintain racial distinctions. Now it is the left that upholds race as the basic determinant of societal relations.

Conservative segregationists scoffed at Martin Luther King’s vision of a colourblind constitution. Now it is the left that condemns the reverend for his colour-blindness. We should hire, fire, promote and condemn based on race. MLK, left-wing anti-racists now tell us, was guilty of “content of character racism”.

Yes campaigners for the Indigenous voice wanted race written permanently into the Australian Constitution. No campaigners, representing most conservative voters, wanted it written out. When I was growing up near Leicester, then and still one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, the far right demanded rights for indigenous Brits. In modern-day Australia, it is the left that makes the equivalent claim for First Nations people.

In Britain, asserting “indigenous rights” is racist. Here it is anti-racist. I have never been able to hear an acknowledgment of country here without thinking how bizarre it would sound in the English Midlands. “Sovereignty was never ceded!” sounds like an anti-EU Brexit slogan.

Why this ideological transposition? Losing wars changes the loser. And the left lost the biggest in its history in 1989.

My year with Barbara began the night the Berlin Wall fell (the other 9/11: November 9). We drank Blue Smirnoff, she in bemused sorrow, me in joyous irony; vodka was one of the few things the Soviet Union did well.

That night, the left lost the key economic argument of the 20th century: command economies don’t work, free-market ones do. People crave the opportunities of the latter. They will flee the former when given the chance.

My bearded university lecturers spent the ensuing years in a state of deep agitation. For many, the fall of communism coincided with their own midlife crises. It was wonderful. Today, zealously held but weak arguments are protected by speech codes and de-platforming. Then, men and women who had backed the Soviet project were subject to debate. Many did not like it.

The game plan thereafter was to establish a leftist catechism, grounded in a cultural revolution, the challenging of which would be heresy.

This “long march through the institutions”, as Rudi Dutschke, the young disciple of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, described it, is reaching some sort of destination now. And what a scene of tedium and enervation it is.Instead of debating big questions, we fly rainbow flags. Safe spaces have taken precedence over dangerous ideas.

When class war didn’t work, new kinds of oppression, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones, were found.

Climate, race and gender have replaced class as the source of left-wing fervour. These wars have been waged much more effectively. Their dialecticism – you are with us or against us, anti-racist or racist, pro-trans or transphobic – has enabled their colonisation of social media.

Marx claimed class war was inevitable. It proved not so. But culture war may well be. The US has been in a protracted one since Roe v Wade in 1973. Australia is flirting with its own version because of the voice debacle.

Climate denialism, structural racism, rape culture and transphobia. Collectively, these progressive priorities now have the quality of crisis. They are spectres haunting the West, to again adapt Marx’s rhetoric. Their negation now mobilises whole campuses and workplaces. Denying their salience, let alone standing against them, is hard to impossible.

In the US, if you want a university job, you will likely have to affirm, in writing and at interview, your contribution to their fighting. Australia is not quite there but we are inching closer. It is one of the forms of American cultural imperialism to which we are most susceptible.

I don’t know what Barbara would make of this transformation of the left. Sadly, dear reader, finding out would be a research project too far for me. I suspect she would be in sympathy with some of it. But much of it she would not recognise as the natural evolution from her 1989 platform.

She did teach me something vital, a lesson too few on the right imbibe. Those on the left are not bad people. They are not evil. But they are naive. They insist on realities that are fantasies. They seek final solutions to problems insoluble. They imagine better worlds while creating worse ones.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of political science at the University of Melbourne.

Failure to mention that the "long march through the institutions" is as moronic as the use of "woke" will result in an F.

Exercise 3:

Imaginatively recreate the rest of the text in this piece, so that the gobbet selected can be seen in its quisling sell-out context. 

Students are encouraged to read the recent New York Times both siderism that saw stories about how Putin was anxious to begin peace talks, and there was no need to worry about Navalny, now that he's been found in an Arctic gulag, with peace of mind to hand ... and never mind the sociopath in charge of the gulag ...

Why Ukraine’s stalemate underscores threat of a global flashpoint 

By michael sexton

5:00AM December 27, 2023

...The return of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, would be such a demand, given that it was part of Russia for centuries and really became part of Ukraine by accident on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. If Crimea is assumed to remain with Russia, the heart of the dispute becomes the allocation of territory in that southeast corner of Ukraine.

There are, however, those in the Biden administration and the congress who don’t take this limited view of the conflict. They see it as a proxy war between the US and Russia with Ukraine supplying the soldiers on the ground and the US and its allies providing the funds and the armaments.

It is hard to see how their agenda of a decisive defeat for Russia could be accomplished unless this is equated with the removal of Vladimir Putin by his own colleagues – an unlikely event on present indications. This is not World War II, when Moscow, like Berlin, could be taken and occupied by foreign troops.

All this raises the question of why some of the administrators and legislators in Washington are so hostile to Russia and were so hostile even before the invasion of Ukraine. It might be thought that the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its domination over eastern Europe would mark the end of the Cold War, but the US embarked on an expansion of NATO up to the borders of the new Russian state. 

Exercise 4:

Calculate the number of times that migrants are mentioned in this piece on the basis of the concluding remarks ...

Treasury’s 2023 report card leaves little to boast about 

By judith sloan

12:00AM December 27, 2023

...Given the tight labour market, the completion of these enormously expensive infrastructure projects is draining workers from the more prosaic task of building new homes that are needed to accommodate the expanding population courtesy of migration.

Simply setting targets for new home completions as the Albanese government has done – 1.2 million new homes across five years – achieves nothing much by itself.

Towards the end of the year there were some emerging signs of slight economic weakness, including sluggish retail sales and home approvals as well as subdued consumer sentiment. While commodity prices eased somewhat, the terms of trade remained at historically high levels through the year.

Given ongoing strong population growth, it seems likely that Australia will avoid a technical recession. But the collapse in real household disposable income, which takes into account tax and mortgage payments, means many Australians have felt worse off during the year.

A central issue is now the speed at which inflation declines, paving the way for lower interest rates. In the US and Britain, inflation has fallen sharply and, in both cases, is within their target range.

The fear here is that services sector inflation may prove sticky, which would prevent us following suit. At this point it’s premature to predict cuts to interest rates next year, particularly given some of the damaging developments noted in this column.

* For struggling students, the teacher's lesson notes calculation has been included below.

Exercise 5:

Explain in no less than 2,000 words how the quarry whisperer is deeply Xian, with reference to this text:

Ignorant activists make a profanity of joyous celebration 

By nick cater

5:00AM December 26, 2023

In the conventional nativity scene described in St Luke’s Gospel, the baby Jesus is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lies in a manger.

This year, in a photograph prominently displayed in the international woke press, a baby doll has been wrapped in the Palestinian keffiyeh and lies on broken breeze blocks and paving slabs.

Lutheran pastor Reverend Munther Isaac assembled this dispiriting tableau in Bethlehem’s Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church. Jesus, claims Isaac, was “born among the occupied and marginalised. He is in solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness”. The true Christmas message, he continues, is that “this genocide must stop now”’. But the activists were not content with merely cancelling Christmas in Bethlehem this year.

They are determined to weaponise it, desecrating holy spaces, disrupting acts of worship and turning a story that is supremely sacred into something utterly profane.

Sacrilege of the nativity scene – purely for political purposes – was also on display in Melbourne on Christmas Eve at the Carols by Candlelight event broadcast to a national TV audience. A group of shallowly educated, morally jejune pro-Palestinian zealots decided it would be okay to storm the stage, insensitive to the spiritual beliefs of their fellow citizens or the presence of children entranced by the magic of Christmas.

It would be pointless to ask these deluded people to take a good, hard look in the mirror because they would only view themselves with undiminished admiration, revelling in the cheap grace they bestow upon themselves. The profanities committed in Bethlehem and Melbourne on Christmas Eve were not the worst sacrilege driven by the dogma of Islamism against the imagined enemy of Christianity.

The Nativity scene showing baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh and placed in rubble to show solidarity with the people of Gaza in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Picture: Getty Images.

The Nativity scene showing baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh and placed in rubble to show solidarity with the people of Gaza in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Picture: Getty Images.

Our minds go back to two terrorists who interrupted mass in the 16th-century church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy in July 2016. The attackers forced 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel to kneel at the foot of the altar and then slit his throat while screaming “Allahu Akbar”. They, too, justified their actions by referring to perceived injustice in the Middle East, warning: “As long as there are bombs on Syria, we will continue our attacks.”

Yet even this cruel act occupies a modest position on the league table of barbarism; sadly, it is far from the most bestial act one human being is capable of delivering on another in pursuit of a supposedly higher cause. There appears to be no limit to human innovation when it comes to the field of torture and death.

A protester adds a portrait on the wall during a rally for supporters and relatives of Israeli hostages held in Gaza 

The Hamas attacks of October 7 took methods pioneered by ISIS to a higher level. Hamas conducted beheadings, rapes, kidnappings and shootings on an industrial scale – the largest and most brutal slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, but this time posted across social media.

The anti-Semitic, anti-Christian nativity defilers appear wilfully blind to the atrocities of that day. They lack the moral courage and intellect to wrestle with the challenge of how Israelis should respond to a terrorist administration on its border, which is committed to wiping a country and its people off the map. What painful trade-offs are demanded? What risks must be taken? These are not the questions with which they are prepared to grapple.

They are also insensitive to spiritual matters, to the message of grace and forgiveness in the Gospel narrative, wherein lies our best hope for peace in a sinful world.

In theology, grace is the watershed that separates Judaeo-Christian philosophy from other forms of religion. Grace, a spontaneous gift from God of divine favour, love and clemency, underpins the obligation to forgive our neighbours and confront our human failings.

It fosters an inward-blaming attitude, rather than the outward-blaming culture characteristic of Palestine where introspection is excused, and the blame for misfortune is attributed to others, frequently long dead.

Isaac claims expertise in Palestinian Theology and the Theology of Land. He is a leading figure in Kairos Palestine, which maintains that the presence of Israelis on Palestinian land is a sin against God and humanity.

He demands that the international community stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle against oppression, displacement and apartheid.

His philosophy of retribution and vengeance runs contrary to the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a fellow Lutheran pastor, theologian and dissident. The Nazis imprisoned him for his opposition to Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia program and anti-Semitic persecution.

Isaac’s redrawing of Jesus’ suffering as a pastiche of Palestinian repression is a denial of Christ’s true sacrifice and suffering that Bonhoeffer would have categorised as cheap grace, “grace sold on the market” in which “the sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices”.

Forgiveness is a virtue that has been regrettably lacking in civil debate in 2023. It was absent from the discussion on the voice to parliament, replete with the narrative of historical injustice and racial guilt.

The two-state dream in the Middle East, the peaceful coexistence of separate Palestinian and Israeli nations, is impossible to realise without the clemency that would allow the discharging of historic debt. The viability of the two-state solution was all but destroyed by the events of October 7 and the desire by Hamas to repeat the atrocity.

In his 1937 book, Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote: “Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love.

“Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love.”

Such overt references to the message of the Gospel go against the zeitgeist in this aggressively secular age. They are all the more potent for that.

A failure to note the use of "woke" as an indication of fuckheadedness will be marked down.

Exercise 6:

Outline in under 2,000 words why the craven Craven is an arrogant prick. Students who feel compelled to write more than 2,000 words will not be marked down. It might well take 100k+ words to evoke in a complete way the level of arrogant prickness revealed.

My Christmas gift to ‘Generation-Greed’: A dash of reality and a hint of perspective 

By greg craven

8:11PM December 26, 2023

Christmas is a time of love, joy and goodwill. Also, in its fuddle of hangovers, appalling family gatherings and insulting gifts, it’s the opportunity to nurse hatred, resentment and naked prejudice. I certainly do.

I’m 65. My body is disintegrating like a Qantas takeoff schedule. My relevance has fled like a serious reader from a Peter FitzSimons doorstopper.

The only consolation is my mind is deteriorating so fast I can’t take it all in.

So my deepest jealous loathing is for younger, fitter, bouncier generations. I contemplate them with a mixture of pure hate and eviscerating envy. Gen X, Y and Z, millennials and whatever an Alpha is, I wish you miserable lives punctuated with catastrophe.

A few plagues would be nice. The odd global conflagration directed by some bad-tempered AI robot would be amusing. An intense acceleration of climate change seems only just given your endless moaning on the subject.

Of course, it’s your fiscal whining on everything from house prices to the cost of living and the price of biodegradable, ethically sourced underpants that really purges the intestines. Don’t you understand? Nobody cares.

Or to put it another way, if we boomers – God, I hate that tired condescension – are rapidly dying out, it is only fair we leave your unrequited economic fantasies to haunt you like the ghost of Keating past. Your resentment is our joy.

It’s the low moaning over real estate that irks me most.

“We can’t buy a house.” “We’re excluded from the market.” “My mortgage is stifling my creativity.”

Listen, sonny. Yes, we bought our first house for a song, namely a tune from the darker recesses of Les Mis. And yes, it was in Brunswick. Or as it was called in those days, Obrunswick. As in: “Where do you live? Ohhhh, Brunswick?”

Our little slice of Hades was a predatory shack waiting to engulf us in its own collapse. It was indeed a funky terrace, but only in the sense that its wooden exoskeleton was held up only by the houses on either side.

And yes, the surrounding atmosphere was diverse and multicultural. Our first neighbours were regularly visited by family members escaping from Pentridge jail. Our second lot kept chickens in the kitchen and sacrificed sheep in their backyard. Really.

I do understand the personal violation inflicted on you by real estate tyranny.

You have a human right to live in Enmore. Those Uighurs should just stop complaining.

I know you have HECS debts from studying at university. You deserve them. We had to drudge through grim syllabuses in the law of contracts or structural engineering. You flitted your way through poverty law for the safely remote and postmodern physics.

No wonder your writing skills are like a self-help guide for narcissists from Newtown and your bridges fall down. You are the tinea of useful education.

Scott Morrison once said you should cut down on avocados to afford a house. How about eliminating aeroplanes from your diet? Most of you baby bludgers saw Paris before puberty and Rio during a primary school beach outing.

By bitter contrast, my wife and I first went overseas when we were 33. We packed two children under 10 and a six-month-old baby. Between shrill insubordination and projectile vomiting, the experience was a cross between a bad holiday vacation movie and The Exorcist.

One distressing reality is that Gen-Greed has developed its own entitled dialect to demand undeserved concessions and promote intergenerational guilt.

It is a doggerel patois mingling meaningless speech patterns drawn from every corporate human resources department, and the least profound pop psychology. As in “If you don’t buy me a car, Dad, I’ll feel really unsafe and gaslighted.”

When I told one of my professionally mendicant sons I was writing this, I received a sententious warning: “Don’t, Dad, my generation is really hurting, and lot of people will be triggered.” Dear God, I hope so.

You can plumb the intellectual depths of these generational malignants by visiting their favourite bookshops in Balmain or Carlton.

Those who are not permanently plugged into reality-cancelling headphones portentously read a melange of management porn for future jobs they will never get, fitness tomes they will never follow, and trite biographies of people who should never have been born. Think Katy Perry’s Guide to a Toned Midriff through Business Networking.

The politics of the generationally correct are as shallow as President Joe Biden’s memory. Forget a Labor Party moderately devoted to workers’ rights or a Coalition vaguely in favour of small business. Just so bourgeois and unimpactful.

Instead, alphabeticals and millennials gambol around the Australian Greens. They particularly enjoy the Greens’ messianic focus on climate change. It is the perfect issue for the generationally motivated because they cannot be held responsible for it and there really is nothing practical they can do about it. Nice lack of work if you can get it.

But the defining feature of the generationally enhanced is their loathing for their parents and their determination that the old folks should die quickly so the loot can be distributed.

These days, when some feckless 40-year-old gazes into their mother’s eyes, it is not love you see. It’s the steely gaze of an open cash register.

It’s not so much the fact they want you to die that gets you. It’s that they want it to happen so damn quickly. Many elderly Australians are being measured for their coffins before their wheelchairs.

Of course, in the meantime, there is the so-called Bank of Mum and Dad. This sounds like some sweet exercise in intergenerational co-operation but actually is a black market where ageing brats exchange their unearned longings for their parents’ hard-earned cash.

It’s the greatest extravaganza of rapacity since Alaric the Goth sacked Rome. Just made worse because the slaughtering hordes are your own children.

In fairness, though, I don’t want to unfairly malign subsequent generations. It’s just that they are shallow, grasping, uncaring and homicidally entitled.

Beyond these slight drawbacks, they’re as cuddly as funnel-web spiders.

Greg Craven was vice-chancellor and president of the Australian Catholic University from 2008 to 2021.

Teacher's notes:

* A: 12, many of them in this gobbet:

Parallels have been drawn with the post-war years of “populate or perish”, in particular the large migrant intakes that occurred during the 1950s. The truth is there is really no comparison because all the migrants in that earlier period were permanent and many of them initially were settled in already built migrant hostels. The vast bulk of these migrants were from Britain and Europe.

Most of the migrant intake now is made up of temporary entrants, mainly international students. The most common source countries are China and India, but recent rapid growth has come from Nepal, The Philippines and Colombia. The most common courses undertaken by international students are business and IT.

The failure of Treasury to anticipate this surge in the population is unforgivable. After the hiatus of the pandemic, there was always going to be a catch-up, with migrant arrivals vastly exceeding migrant departures. The modelling should have picked this up.

The pressures on the housing sector, in particular, and other infrastructure were easy to predict.

It was incumbent on Treasury to recommend action to ensure the migrant intake was manageable. Its ideological adherence to a big Australia and the supposed fiscal and demographic benefits of a large migrant intake seemingly prevented officials from offering this sage advice.

The fact is that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil dithered about the stance of migration policy for most of the year, swinging from endorsing the historically high migrant intake to finally taking some very modest measures to rein in arrivals. In particular, the delay in ditching the Covid visa was inexcusable.

Students who noted five mentions of 'migration' will be given an "A".

Visual quiz:

As the university Xmas challenge on the Beeb always has an image test, these are the image questions.

Discuss the arguments regarding the relevance of running an Xmas-themed cartoon in the immediate post-Xmas season. Is it sufficient justification to see it as a prophecy as well as a summary of events preceding?

Explain why consideration of details might allow the use of this cartoon, though it is no longer Poxing Day ... (details are supplied to help slow students).  A suggestion that every day is Poxing Day in herpetology studies will be allowed as an argument, but evidence must be supplied.