In which the pond is again forced to abandon the reptile hunger games, with Lloydie of the Amazon jousting for attention with the hole in the bucket man ...

 

With hits down but sparkling poetry driving the comments up, once again the pond feels mortified at having to abandon its reptile hunger games. There's simply too much happening ...

The pond was pleased to see that Christian Ziegler led off the undercard in Charlie Sykes' Deplorables of the Year, Part I, especially with the news Sources: Christian Ziegler wants multimillion-dollar buyout to step down as Florida GOP Chair

Grifters gunna grift ...

The pond was however disappointed that Charlie didn't make it a joint award, what with family values being all the go, though he did mention Bridget Ziegler's ability to help put the libertine back in "Moms for Liberty".

If the pond had to pick a favourite - really, they're all favourites - it would be Kandiss Taylor:

Kandiss Taylor, a recently elected GOP District Chair in Georgia, would like to know why Big Globe won’t stop shoving round-Earth propaganda down our throats.
In an interview with David Weiss (AKA “Flat Earth Dave”) and Matt Long on her “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” podcast, Taylor and her guests discussed biblical “evidence” that the Earth is actually flat as a pancake. “The people that defend the globe don’t know anything about the globe,” said Weiss. “If they knew a tenth of what Matt and I know about the globe they would be Flat Earthers.” 
“All the globes, everywhere” Taylor said later in the discussion. “I turn on the TV, there’s globes in the background … Everywhere there’s globes. You see them all the time, it’s constant. My children will be like ‘Mama, globe, globe, globe, globe’ — they’re everywhere.” 

The reptiles can't compete with that kind of offering. Even John Crace might struggle, though there's much fun in Disabled people don't need a minister, thinks Sunak - they just need to try harder.

Sykes promises tomorrow (US time) The Worst of the Worst, so likely there'll be fierce arguments about those on the undercard who thought they were contenders for the top rankings ...

Meanwhile, it seems that ancient racist bigot the Bolter is in narcissist need of attention- clicks must be down - and Chris Bowen made the mistake of giving him some. 

The pond won't make the same mistake, but the fuss is on view in Chris Bowen calls on News Corp to sack Andrew Bolt for column saying Australians sick of ‘kowtowing to the primitive’.

That ended with the bleeding obvious:

The columnist, who has a long history of campaigning against measures to reduce emissions, has previously described global heating as a “cult of the elites”.
The commentator is known for promoting the views of climate science deniers, and for his own attacks on “alarmists” and his derision of climate change science.
Despite this, News Corp’s executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, said in 2019 “there are no climate change deniers around I can assure you”, after he was asked at the corporation’s annual meeting why his company gives them “so much airtime” in Australia.
News Corp has been contacted for comment.

So the Graudian contacted News Corp for comment about a bigoted racist climate science denialist who's been doing it for years? And the emeritus chairman denying his denialists? In their dreams ...

But that did set one hare running this day, or at least one Lloydie of the Amazon, with the colossus finally bestirring himself and leading off the comments section ...

Yes, there's the hole in the bucket man, which is why there had to be at least two reptiles this day, though the pond felt safe ruling out the meretricious Merritt, the jerk-off Jennings and the lizard Oz editorialist ... and as for making the country smarter, that's easy. Stop writing for the lizard Oz, and better still, stop reading the reptiles ...

But fools and the pond persist, so it was on with Lloydie's wishful rhetoric ...

It's possible to sense the despair in Lloydie's tone, what with insidious incrementalism in play, but meanwhile, in another country, on another planet, in another universe, this, a story by an actual environment editor, Damian Carrington ...

You'd think the failure would have pleased Lloydie of the Amazon ... but what of sweet, dinkum, clean, virginal Oz coal, and gas, and SMRs and nuking the country, he cries, giving the mock turtle a run for its money ...

Indeed, indeed, but meanwhile, back on that alternative planet in another universe ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles knew what to do... a picture of Satan himself, arms spread wide, ready to befoul sweet dinkum virginal coal and gas ...

You know, this Satan ...

Then there was one last rousing call to arms by Lloydie of the Amazon ...

Oh indeed, indeed, let's heat up the planet some more. Just take out the plastic, and safeguard what furniture is left ...

How kind of the infallible Pope to produce a cartoon just for Lloydie this day ...

Meanwhile, the pond neglected to mention a strange coupling at the top of the digital edition ...

Yes, there was Claire cackling, while a cricketer was reduced to a black armband, which a visitor from another planet might have taken as mourning for a lost relative ...

Long gone are the days of sporting protests ...

As for Claire's cackle about selective free speech, the pond felt safe excluding it, what with news from Germany ... Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos

The pond had already featured Masha Gessen's piece in The New Yorker ...In the Shadow of the Holocaust, How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.

They had delivered a few home truths ...

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

It seems this passage particularly stuck in the noses of the Germans ...

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

You won't find Claire cackling about the freedom to have this speech, but you will find this in the Graudian per the link above ...

The pond's excuse for this detour? It sets the scene for censorious Henry blathering on in his usual way about the need to censor speech he doesn't agree with ...

Meanwhile, speaking of atrocities, the Graudian's live section started running snaps of horror porn ...

Our Henry is made of stern stuff, and won't have any time for those sorts of buckets ...

As a McCarthyist devotee of some note, our Henry shows how he knows which side his chairman emeritus-approved bread is buttered on ...

Still, the pond notes the censorious tone in our agitated Henry's voice, and pardon the pond if it wanders off to discuss a little bit of apartheid in action right here, right now, involving settler colonial control and ethnic cleansing...

You see much has been said about a two state solution, and is still being said, per the Graudian live reporting ...

It is of course a nonsense, an elaborate bit of window dressing, a theatrical performance sustained for decades, and never a goer so long as Benji's mob, devoted to apartheid, gulags and ethnic cleansing, are in charge of the show, as was made clear in another bit of the Graudian live, ironically juxtaposed just below ...

With the greatest disrespect, what a twit His Lordship is ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles began producing assorted snaps, including a downcast Ed, downcast at being in the same company as Benji and John Locke...

 

Snaps out of the way, it was on with the hole in the bucket man valiantly defending a theocratic state ...

Meanwhile, as Henry's blather rolls on, so the collective punishment rolls on ...

Does any of this have any affect on the hole in the bucket man?

Of course not, he's off in the ether wanking about Thomas Hobbes...

Meanwhile, in another country, apparently on another planet, certainly in a universe remote from our Henry ...

Confronted with the collective punishment, the disease, the starvation, the indiscriminate bombing and the killing fields, the IDF came out with a richly comic routine involving "serious discipline"...

Starvation, hunger, disease and mass slaughter, collective punishment and ethnic cleansing, and suddenly there's a fit of principle about shoes and singing?

Never mind, time to finish off with a last gobbet from our Henry, oblivious and now blathering about Locke ...

What a wanker he is, though admittedly a tireless one ... and luckily, here's a Wilcox to help him ...

On the upside, the pond isn't living in Taliban Texas ...