The pond is always looking for a way to open which doesn't involve the reptiles and Kyle Chayka provided a splendid angle in The New Yorker by posing a question, The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era ... (paywall), with the lede There is something paradoxical about pinning a name on an age characterized by extreme uncertainty. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
Chayka opened strongly, with a list of possibilities:
In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.
Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?
During the past weeks, I’ve been casting about to see what ideas are already out there. Suggestions I’ve found include the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. The novelist William Gibson coined “the Jackpot” in his 2014 novel “The Peripheral” for a near-future period of intersecting apocalyptic crises, when everything seems to be happening at once. In 2016, the scholar Donna Haraway deemed our time the Chthulucene, inspired by a word derived from ancient Greek, “chthonic”—of or relating to the muddy, messy, impenetrable underworld. The artist and author James Bridle titled their 2016 book on technology and our collapsing sense of the future “New Dark Age,” taking a phrase from H. P. Lovecraft.
The long 2016 is of course too American-centric. Whatever the mango Mussolini is - narcissist authoritarian with fascist leanings will do - he's as much a symptom as the disease itself...
The pond actually leaned to Assholocene, but Chayka came up with another contender ...
The urge to name reflects the urge to understand. In February, Liz Lenkinski, a social strategist in Los Angeles, began referring to our era as the Age of Unhingement in conversations with friends. The phrase stuck, and she started an Unhingement-themed newsletter. “It makes me feel saner to talk about it,” Lenkinski told me. She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to. This knowledge can cause a kind of spiritual infirmity. “The unhingement comes from not being able to know what’s next,” Lenkinski said. “Since 2020, it feels like we have all just collectively been through one nightmare after another.” The emergencies vary drastically in scale, impacting every facet of our lives: news about climate change commingles with that of warfare, inflation, and supply-chain delays, not to mention everyday incidents like neighbors stealing your Amazon packages. “If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there,” Lenkinski said. (That newsletter is on Substack here).
This is good as far as it goes, but the dawn of the Age of Unhingement came long ago, with the birth of the Chairman Emeritus, the Unhinger in chief in many countries ...
And then the question arises, is the pond dealing with a number of deeply unhinged reptiles, or the bunch at the centre of the Assholocene, or can they be both?
It's the wrong question. The lizard Oz is just an unhinged outpost of a vast, deeply unhinged media conglomerate, an Assholocene of the Unhinged, each day working to produce the Age of Unhingement ...
The pond immediately had to red card Dame Slap for her deeply unhinged obsession with demonising Higgins, while completely ignoring the reprehensible matters relating to Lehrmann.
And the pond chose to ignore "Ned's" latest unhinged rant. Perhaps tomorrow, there's only so much a possum can koala bear ...
Down below the fold the unhingement continued ...
Surely the dog botherer and the bro are amongst the most deeply unhinged reptiles in the lizard Oz ... so what better way to experience an unhinged Saturday ...
"In the dark recesses of my heart lurks a climate alarmism iconoclast"?
Well that's the first big lie. The dog botherer's climate science denialism has been on display for well over a decade, and right at the moment talk of escaping the northern winter is typical iconoclasm from the dog botherer, what with the recent news, noted in abundance everywhere except in the lizard Oz ...
The pond shares the dog botherer's contempt for King Chuck, though the DB's faux repuglianism was really only an excuse so he could attack the jingoistic arguments and leftist posturing of the Australian republican movement. With friends like that, who needs monarchist enemies of the Flinty kind?
And there's nothing much to be said about the absurdity of hanging around in the UAE, so the dog botherer can have at that ...
It is of course the wrong time to carry on like the dog botherer, but that's why he does it ...
Things look grum, as they say in fush and chups land, and not likely to get better ...
Meanwhile, the dog botherer blathers away, while the planet melts ...
Speaking of hypocrisy, please allow the pond to dwell on the dog botherer's history a moment ...
It was way back on 18th September 2013 that Liam Kenny
denounced his father in Junkee, noting - among many other issues -
He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change.
Unfortunately the link offered is now stone cold dead, but the title embedded in it gives an idea of the content ...
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/im-sick-of-the-scare-tactics-in-climate-debate/story-e6freaj3-1111116987882
Buried now, lost in the digital ether, but back then climate science was just a debate, and any of the scientific illiterates in the lizard Oz could join the debate... provided they were on the climate science denialist bandwagon ...
These days the way to nuke the debate is to offer to nuke the country, knowing that any interest in renewables must be attacked in aid of fossil fuels, dressed up as a love of SMRs ...
There's never really been an about-turn, but the dog botherer was celebrated as being in the top five of the unhinged reptile denialists ...
In December 2020, Wendy Bacon and Arunn Jegan analysed all news, features, opinion pieces, letters and editorials discussing climate change that appeared in The Daily Telegraph, Herald-Sun, Courier Mail and The Australian between April 2019 and March 2020.
They found 45 per cent of all coverage either rejected or cast doubt on consensus scientific findings. Their research asserted that most News Corp reporters do not promote sceptical views, but of 55 per cent of stories that accepted climate science, misunderstandings about that science were almost always promoted rather than explained, and the reporting on the effects of climate change was negligible.
Half of the news and feature stories either had no source or one source.
Nearly two thirds of published opinion pieces were sceptical of climate science. The top five climate sceptics were Sky News presenters Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Peta Credlin, Peter Gleeson and Chris Kenny.
"Sceptical of climate science" is the polite way of saying full blown ratbag denialist ... and now see how the dog botherer purports some mild concern, provided we can nuke the country ...
Back in the day, the dog botherer wasn't worried about the need to nuke the country. It was just a debate, the science was rigged, there was a BOM conspiracy, and so on and so forth, and all the reptiles helped out ...
According to Marian Wilkinson, whose recent book The Carbon Club is a forensic analysis of the interplay between the political, media and industry actors who have stalled action on climate in Australia for decades, News Corp’s coverage influenced other media in the country.
She believes even the ABC “pulled its punches” on climate coverage for fear it would look soft when compared with the Murdoch press’s hardline climate denialism.
Wilkinson is one of many who believe that Australian climate and energy policy has been rudderless for decades, but she does not blame News alone.
Rather she says the Murdoch empire helped derail climate action along with well-connected fossil fuel industry lobbyists and complicit politicians from both parties.
The result is the nation is now slowly engaging in the process of decarbonising its energy system, but years have been lost and billions of dollars of public money wasted, she says.
So far News Corp has not commented on – or denied – the coverage and its silence is being met with speculation. They did not respond to a request for comment about this article.
Wilkinson notes that if News Corp does shift its editorial stance it would be falling in line with the corporate and financial sectors and with major advertisers such as Woolworths and Coles.
Mann is one of many who note that such a move would also help solve a problem for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who wants to announce a net zero target before or at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow but faces trenchant opposition from some Nationals MPs.
“This may be more about giving Morrison cover going into an election year, by establishing the pathetically low bar of ‘net zero carbon by 2050’ as somehow constituting meaningful action, particularly given that he is being roundly criticised by the world community for his meager climate commitments going into COP26,” Mann said on Friday.
“‘Inactivists’ – polluters and politicians and media outlets such as News Corp that have enabled them – are moving away from outright denial because it’s no longer tenable.
“This is particularly true in Australia after having lived through the climate change-fuelled devastation of the Black Summer of 2019-20. Instead, as I describe in the book, they’ve turned to other tactics – delay, distraction, deflection, division, etc – in their effort to maintain the fossil fuel status quo.
“Focusing on a target of 2050, three decades away, kicks the can so far down the road that it’s largely meaningless.”
Though he welcomes the apparent shift in editorial direction, Flannery says the impact of its coverage extends beyond the politics of climate change.
He recalls meeting James Murdoch, who recently quit the company in part due to its climate coverage, at an awards dinner a decade or so ago.
“What you’ve done,” he told him, “is destroyed people’s faith in science, and that will play out in many ways and it will take many decades to undo that damage.”
Murdoch, he says, looked sheepish.
That Nine story featured some splendid headlines ... you can pick the font and the reptiles from miles away ...
Cue a snap of a sheepish-looking politician in the dog botherer rant ...
And so to the final talk of unabated alarmism and nauseating virtue-signalling ...
The dog botherer will be a denialist to the day he dies, and as far as climate science records go, it'll all be spittle on a griddle to him ...
While it's a bit mangled, there's an infallible Pope just for him ...
Madame speaker, could we also fit a bracelet to the unhinged at News Corp, and follow that up with a Uncle Elon joke ...
How to ruin Twitter and the image of EVs, by Uncle Elon ...
The pond needed that break, because time with the unhinged bromancer has of late been heavy going ...
Why is the bromancer blathering on like this, with no attempt to bury the Islamophobia beneath the surface?
It's the old pea and thimble trick, and there's a lot to distract from as reports continue to pour in ... in the
Graudian's live coverage for example and not just the US blocking a ceasefire ...
With a catastrophic ethnic cleansing well under way, and crimes against humanity a regular feature, of course the bro is in need of a distraction ...
Meanwhile, back at ground zero, ritual public humiliation is the order of the day ...
Well at least he was given a blanket ...
Meanwhile, the bromancer is working hard to distract from the ugliness ...
At this point the reptiles offered up a snap ...
... but they never seem to be able to find any of these in their files ...
And so it's on with the unhinged bromancer ...
If the pond might be so bold, there was a golden age of equal rights, and it
even has its own wiki, and the pond still remembers being made to study it ...
And so on. It is possible for people of different faiths and no faith to get along.
Why the pond can even forgive the mass slaughter of atheists, secularists, deviants and such like by rabid fundamentalists of the bromancer Catholic kind, as well as other barking mad religious fundamentalists devoted to the burning and drowning of women as witches and so on and so forth ...
The dog botherer then pauses to offer a bout of billy goat buttism, more spit on the unhinged griddle ...
Ah, the Godwin's Law strategy and a snap of a devious looking chap ...
Then it's on with more Godwin's Law breaking ...
"It goes without saying, but it must be said"?
Breathtaking really, to shift from the Nazis to saying that some of the local folk are okay, while the Islamophobia bubbles away merrily on the surface ... what a contemptible, condescending human bean he is ...
Talk about an epic, unhinged distraction, and yet talk of the war and the brutalities and the ethnic cleansing and the mass displacement can be found elsewhere, as in
Aljazeera's live coverage ...
The demolition and destruction machine rolls on and everything's grist to the collective punishment mill ...
You won't see or hear anything of this from the bromancer or in the lizard Oz, but then, when it comes to history, they're not that big on talking about the Crusades either ...
Yes, the Islamophobia, hate and fear is strong in this unhinged one, and as usual talk of nuttiness is just a projection, a way of hiding the personal nuttiness routinely paraded in that Assholocene rag helping cultivate the Age of Unhingement ...
Meanwhile, the mission goes on ...
What are we going through now: I submit 'The Unenlightenment' - a time when what we knew to be fact is questioned, when people turn to mystics, influencers, reptiles (and specifically The Reptiles) and the like, when institutions and religions are debunked only to be replaced by charlatans, spivs, ideologues and their advisors, when science and truth can be artificially manufactured, bought and sold; where are those who will lead us back into the light, or will we remain in the fearsome after-dark; where is our St Greta of Aus, thunderberging a path to sanity, and a hopeful future? AG.
ReplyDeleteIt has ever been thus, AG. For instance:
Delete"As a medical therapy, bleeding or blood-letting endured for approximately 2,500 years. It was only abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century. The roots of bleeding as a medical therapy can be found in the Aristotlean idea that all matter is composed of four elements: air, fire, earth, and water. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates adopted this idea to explain health and disease in humans."
http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/59/Bleeding.html
Now that all sounds eminently reasonable, doesn't it ? Sufficient 'reason' for it to last about 2500 years and to still have its devotees even now:
"Despite the fact that doctors no longer prescribe bloodletting, the practice has not died out entirely.
In some communities around the world, there are people who still believe that this practice can help cure all sorts of ailments and diseases."
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/bloodletting-why-doctors-used-to-bleed-their-patients-for-health#A-strange-precursor-to-blood-transfusion?
So what indeed can we say about the age of homo sapiens sapiens ? Other than that this is the Age of Continuing Stupidity.
Chayka: "did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages?" Maybe, except that there never was a "Dark Ages", just a time that was a little bit less "popularised" than the ages before and after it.
ReplyDelete"As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and the 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the Dark Ages appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century), and today's scholars also reject its usage for the period. The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
To be fair GB ...
Delete...In the past few years, the term “new dark age” has been used to encompass the decay of democracy and the increasingly blatant impact of climate change. The name represents “a smack in the face to the idea of progress. That there can be a dip in the line—that alone terrifies people,” Bridle said.
Yet “dark age” itself is something of a misnomer. It was coined in the fourteenth century by the Italian writer Petrarch, who used it to describe not widespread civilizational decline or chaos but a lacklustre literary culture in his own time and place compared with classical antiquity. The sixteenth-century historian Caesar Baronius used “saeculum obscurum,” “dark age” in Latin, to describe the scarcity of historical records from tenth-century Europe—not that the period necessarily sucked, just that it was a blank—which is certainly not a problem in our current age. According to Larisa Grollemond, an art historian and curator of medieval manuscripts at the Getty Museum, the name reinforces a stereotype of the medieval millennium as “a time of sickness, of plague, of a stagnation in art and culture.” But, Grollemond said, the so-called Dark Ages were also marked by the rise of universities, mechanical clocks, the printing press, astrolabes, crop rotation, and mead. “I think there’s darkness about every age,” she continued. “It’s a very human thing to want to find yourself in history. I don’t think we will ever stop periodizing.”
To be fair, DP, human society goes up and down and round about and it always has and it most probably always will. After all, it wasn't until the late 700s that Charlemagne conquered large swaths of Europe and established the foundation for the Holy Roman Empire.
DeleteAnd sure, I'm happy to declare anything that goes by the name Holy Roman Empire as very dark indeed.
There is Kenny having a go at political leaders and their entourages travelling to the UAE apparently as a distraction from other issues, and then apparently completely unaware of what he is sribbling, he tells us he has travelled there (apparently a number of times, as he cites “the first time” he went) as part of “a political visit”. So there he was as part of a political entourage, just like the people he is criticising here. Oh, but of course, it was Chris Kenny and from his air-conditioned cubicle in The Australian’s offices, he can look down on the UAE and sneer at their use of energy to provide what he describes as “magnificent” greenery.
ReplyDeleteMind you, the irrationality began with his claim a cold weather event was a sign that climate change is not occurring when the denialist’s usual argument is that a heatwave weather event is a sign that climate change is not occurring, which argument misses the whole issue of the science, which examines the trends over time.
The monarchists and the onion muncher will have to have a word with Kenny about his put down of His Royal Highness. It might put a spanner in the works of future knighthoods.
Only 13 days till Xmas and no sign of the war with China. Could there be a terrorist attack instead?
DeleteI did see a few News Corp papers lying on the pavement outside a couple of properties one day with the headline in huge bold letters (it’s the only way News Corp gets noticed): “Fear and Loathing’. No idea what it was about, but I steered clear. Lucky I did, as it may have been contaminated with whatever is affecting Greg.
Anyone at a university in the USA is on the far left according to Sheridan. So no Republicans at American universities then.
Sheridan accepts that concern about civilians dying in Gaza is not a sign of anti-Semitism, but if you are on the left of politics and turn up to a demonstration, or protest in some way against civilians dying in Gaza, then you are anti-Semitic. His doctor needs to change his prescription.
Then his argument moves into all Arabs Hate Jews (“Arab anti-Semitism long predates Nazis or the Muslim Brotherhood.”). Well, by Arabs he means all Muslims, well, let’s qualify, most Muslims, well, hold on, not all anti-Semitism is by Muslims, but most is and most are Arabs and the world is being swamped with Muslims, so there’s a lot to fear. No wonder there is fear and loathing; some it is emanating from Sheridan’s keyboard.
Apparently all these Arabs and Muslims are politically left. You know, like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iranian leaders, because all fundamentalists somehow are leftists, even though fundamentalists and conservative Arabs seem to hate the left and support the policies of the right, you know like the UAE supporting fossil fuel and nuclear energy, but that’s a small matter to Greg.
Actually, in 2018 Deutsche Welle had a video on the rise in anti-Semitism in Poland and another (longer ) on anti-Semitism in Europe and neither supports Greg’s claim about Poland. It was the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PIS) which banned any claim linking Poland with Nazi war crimes. So, by the by, what were Europe’s “traditional beliefs”, Greg?
"His doctor needs to change his prescription". Yeah, very well spotted, Anony. Though there's really quite a few that that can be said about, isn't there.
DeleteThey don't get much more conservative than the London Telegraph and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is one of their star columnists, so this is a bit of a surprise: We no longer need the Cop circus – technology and markets are already solving the climate crisis . (paywall)
ReplyDeleteThe “technological learning rate” of solar, wind, and now batteries is so relentless that a 24/7 mix is already cheaper than new coal in most of the world, and will become massively cheaper almost everywhere over time.
“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable. It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency.
The pace depends on whether vested interests succeed in delaying the rollout of technology that already exists, and whether they can head off investment in new technology at the point of critical breakthrough.
Technology and market price signals are already solving the problem without need for degrowth, hairshirts and sacrifice. That is what we should be proclaiming from the rooftops.
(It's reprinted in the Nine papers today, without the graphs.)
And not even a passing mention of compressed air energy storage:
DeleteHundreds of jobs on horizon after green light for Hydrostor compressed-air energy storage in Broken Hill
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-08/hundreds-jobs-hyrostor-energy-storage-project-broken-hill-sa/103206346
The paper mentioned in the article is "The momentum of the solar energy transition" at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7 It's open access.
DeleteThe bromancer is obviously a (laugh-a-minute) "religious" nutter but unfortunately because demographic numbers are very important and do shape the destiny of almost every country the bromancer has a point re the present-time and future negative influence of the world-wide growth of Islam, especially in Western countries, especially in Europe.
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say that if and when islamacists do gain the necessary demographically based political power to change and thus to possibly even enforce their benighted medieval world-view then that definitely will be a disaster for the world altogether.
There's still about 2.4 billion Christians in the world as compared with about 1.9 billion muslims. So there's a while to go yet, Anony. Besides, many of the female muslims are beginning to opt for "christian" liberties - like going to school and playing sport and not being subject to 'forced marriages' and so forth.
DeleteBesides, Muslims supposedly believe in the same gods as Christians, except that the muslims think he's just this one 'Allah' bloke and not a Trinity.
Out here in tangent land, the Woman from Wycheproof had her last time on Sky for this year, last night. She started to tell us she would be talking about peace and goodwill, then displayed reptile triumphalism over the referendum, moving to Abbottic triumphalism over the unqualified benefits that still flow to our land of Girtby, from Britain. She then moved to beating up on all who she considered to have the slightest tincture of 'leftism' and mixed her denunciation of 'identity politics' with her earnest assurance of how proud she was to have come from Wycheproof. I suppose goodwill accrues only to those who did not fit into any of the groups she disparaged, and being from Wycheproof is not an identity.
ReplyDeleteSeems she will be absent from 'Sky' until mid-January. Guess she needs a long rest to recover from the mental effort of reading out, each night, the talking points that came from Liberal HQ each morning.
One can only have unqualified envy of one whose life is filled with such unending joys.
DeleteHmm: "Closer to home, we’ve seen a dispiriting revival of zero-sum politics, supercharged by a media cycle geared to making news consumers feel things as opposed to thinking about them."
ReplyDeleteSomehow Australian politics has delivered a Christmas miracle – and that’s a big deal
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/09/somehow-australian-politics-has-delivered-a-christmas-miracle-and-thats-a-big-deal