The pond was sorely tempted by a whisperer in the dark arts visiting the pond and urging it to stray, like an old fashioned tout standing outside a Kings X night club in days of yore.
Was it right to abandon the reptiles and have a dalliance further afield?
What was this Quad Rant, what were these tales of derring do, what could be seen exploring the land beyond the mugwump swamp?
Is it true that these are fallen angels, reptile outcasts, refugees from the lizard Oz? In their benighted exile, had they suddenly been blessed with great wisdom and insight?
The pond made a special trip to check, and indeed it is true ... there are astonishing sights to behold ...
Of course that title referring to the Great Reset immediately made the pond think of the Great Snatch ...
To people with a definite agenda, every crisis has the potential to advance it. For forty years now, the World Economic Forum President, Professor Klaus Schwab, has marketed his annual Davos gathering as a chance to address the key-crisis-of-the-moment, invariably through intensified global elite networking and more joined-up government. Naturally, he seized upon the pandemic as a golden opportunity to push for a more comprehensive version of the health-industrial state that so readily took over people’s daily lives in order to protect us from an illness which people under seventy had a 99.9 per cent chance of surviving.
Perhaps the pond should have begun at the beginning of the comic, because it shares a lot in common with the conspiracy-laden onion muncher ...
Instead of the long absent lord, why not the onion muncher putting it all together?
Why have the reptiles let this tremendous talent go to waste? Why has he been exiled to wander the globe talking to authoritarian dictators or do conferences with Jordan? How did he end up in the land of the Quad Ranters?
In June 2020, Schwab issued his current version of elite intellectualism:
"The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market towards fairer outcomes … Depending on the country, these may include changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies and new rules governing intellectual property, trade and competition … The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals such as equality and sustainability. Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress … This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics … The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. During the Covid 19 crisis, companies, universities and others have joined forces … Imagine what could be possible if similar concerted efforts were made in every sector …"
The Great Reset? How soon before the Great Rapture?
How could anyone doubt the onion muncher's astonishing insights?
To the critics in this volume, “Davos thinking” has become dangerously entrenched at the top levels of most institutions: hence businesses are run less to produce goods and services than to promote diversity, and economies less to create prosperity than to reduce emissions. Many of these essays deal with the Great Reset only to the extent needed to be part of a volume against it, but nearly all of them are worth reading because of what they have to say about key aspects of contemporary life such as the decline of politics and the politicisation of business. An underlying theme is the extent to which the Marxist zealots who were unable to persuade the working classes to upend the system in order to create equality have been far more influential in persuading the middle classes to upend the system in order to save the planet, to end the patriarchy and to combat racism. Yet like all revolutions, these ones too will end in tears.
One of the most extraordinary features of an almost uniquely dispiriting time was the way the pandemic plans that many governments had developed over decades (none of which involved closing down all non-essential activity for months on end) were junked in favour of versions of the Wuhan plan that could only have happened in a totalitarian state: locking everyone up in the hope that the virus would die out. In a clinical dissection of our pandemic follies, Douglas Murray deplores the collective cowardice behind the failure to blame China for unleashing (even if unintentionally) this scourge upon the world, the absence of any cost-benefit analysis once media-driven panic had taken hold, and the fake science behind all the catastrophic early predictions of doom and the changing instructions about things like masks. The Great Reset, he says, “aims to replace national government with world government, and in an increasingly CCP-dominated world, that would lead in only one direction: against the cause of democratic and financial freedom”.
In an enthralling essay, Angelo Codevilla charts the decline of American education into the kind of culturally self-loathing relativist swamp to whose alumni notions like a Great Reset seem plausible. In the Second World War, he says, only 4 per cent of some 18 million US draftees were illiterate. Yet a generation later, despite a massive increase in education funding, 27 per cent of Vietnam War draftees were judged functionally illiterate.
Conrad Black was a regular attendee at Davos for many years and, in a masterly account of the follies of contemporary capitalism, observes that Davos is in favour of democracy and capitalism but only the “right” types. He laments the “venality, cowardice and invertebrate tactical stupidity of much of the corporate world” exemplified by “oil companies putting up slick television praising and purporting to be part of the heroic march to a fossil-free world”. He’s one of several authors here noting the moral decline of businesses that, for instance, boast of their ESG credentials while outsourcing parts of their supply chain to slave labour in Xinjiang or child labour in the Congo.
One of the most instructive chapters is Michael Anton’s analysis of Marxism and capitalism. He contrasts the contemporary capitalism of the IT-facilitated “gig economy” with mid-twentieth-century capitalism characterised by high wages and stable employment. He says that the modern danger is less from old-style socialism than from “the cabal of bankers, techies, corporate executives, politicians, senior bureaucrats, academics and pundits who coalesce around the World Economic Forum and seek to change, reduce, restrict and homogenise the Western way of life—but only for ordinary people”. He says the Great Reset “combines the worst elements of libertarian capitalism with most of the worst of socialism and rolls them together with utterly irredeemable wokeness”.
Could the pond help with those questions?
Still not satisfied? Turn back, ungodly heathen, to the astonishing insights of the onion muncher ...
Yet for all Western countries’ alleged oppressions, they’re still the only places that others want to flee to, whether that’s Africans seeking a better life or wealthy Chinese who don’t trust their own government. What’s needed is a recovery of self-belief based on the undoubted fact that Western countries remain the world’s most free, fair and prosperous; and that the pre-pandemic, pre-Ukraine, pre-October 7 world was more safe, more rich, more free and more fair for more people than ever before in history, based on seven decades of freer trade, freer speech and freer politics sustained and protected by the US-led global order.
Against the Great Reset is a powerful critique of our contemporary ills and of how Davos Man is making them worse. It doesn’t offer an explicit alternative, although it implicitly points to the eighteenth-century liberal conservatism of Edmund Burke, who saw true freedom as grounded in religion, personal character and social order. Perhaps this volume has helped to prepare the ground for an alternative worldview, that represented by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which has recently held its inaugural conference in London, which aimed to tell “a better story” about the strengths of Western civilisation. To the Davos agenda of climate anxiety, global equality, world governance, woke capitalism and suppressing “misinformation”, the ARC offered freedom of speech, support for small business, protection of the family, patriotism and educational rigour.
Still, at a time of green hysteria, gender confusion, religious scepticism and cultural uncertainty, it will take better political leadership than any major Western country has recently had to craft a political program that’s capable of restoring confidence in our societies. The fact that nearly every country now wants to forget the pandemic as a kind of collective bad dream, rather than rigorously analyse it lest we make the same mistakes again, shows how governance has generally become worse as it’s become bigger and ever more intrusive.
edited by Michael Walsh
Bombardier Books, 2022, 474 pages, $49.80
There's only one more thing to note ...
The Hon. Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015
He is risen, and walks amongst the Quad Ranters ... and by now you should know what that means ...
At this point, some might note that the pond hasn't discussed a single thought bubble delivered by the onion muncher and that is deliberate.
It seems to the pond that the only point worth debating is whether the onion muncher was the worst Prime Minister of the 21st century. Are there others who can match his singular incapacity? Some might argue for SloMo, others might urge Malware's case, some might even have a soft spot for former Chairman Rudd. But can any of them hold a candle to the master?
Then the only argument becomes whether the onion muncher might hold his own with the worst PMs in living memory. Is he more than a match for Billy McMahon? Surely he'd thrash Harold Holt, surely he'd make Black Jack look like a champion?
The advantage the onion muncher has in the competition is psychological, some would say deeply Freudian. No one else exhibits his peculiar combination - very unique, the ABC would say - of relevancy deprivation syndrome and narcissism, and fundamentalist tendencies which have kept evolving since being installed by a fundamentalist wing of the Catholic church.
Malware exhibits narcissism, but it's that of the idle rich, and never on a level with the onion muncher's plodding attention-seeking. The lying rodent likes to parade for the reptiles, but he affects the guise of an elder statesman, a kind of Ming the merciless reborn. The onion muncher presents as a cultural wars warrior ratbag, desperately hoping to find a space in the sun as a far right minion, so far down the rabbit hole that he must face a crisis each morning when his eyelids flutter open. Does his mean he's become woke?
Has there ever been a former PM who has looked and sounded so needy, in desperate need of people who are different and ideas that are different to his fixed, narrow and bigoted view of the world? So that he can resume his bullying, preening and strutting ways out in the public gaze, mistaking confusion and bewilderment for interest and even admiration ...
Discuss as long as you like, knowing that defeat, ennui and despair will be the only true winner...
Finally, in an entirely unrelated matter, John Quiggin has put out an urgent bulletin regarding the gallon loaf, desperately searching for feedback ... all the pond can offer is that a gallon of onion muncher still goes a very long way ...
Good to see that the Muncher remains steadfast in his opposition to politicians taking any notice of the views of “expects”. His glittering political career, and particularly his Prime Ministerial achievements, certainly bear witness to the benefits of such an approach.
ReplyDeleteYes, when I want lessons on the moral of business, I find the career of Conrad Black to be quite instructive…..
ReplyDeletecf https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/media-baron-conrad-black-says-abbott-looks-like-a-man-of-principle-20131105-iyyeh
DeleteGeorge W Bush was a “bonehead" president and the US an increasingly “silly country" with an “incoherent foreign policy", according to the fallen media baron Conrad Black .
But the Canadian-born historian and former prisoner – who was released last year after serving 42 months in a US jail – told The Australian Financial Review on his first visit Down Under for 14 years that he is impressed by what he has seen of Tony Abbott .
Takes a con to spot a con ...
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“Yet Melbourne was only a somewhat more extreme version of the scientism and safetyism that afflicted most of the world between 2020 and 2022.”
The brilliance of the Onion Muncher is how he is always an echo chamber for any cliched nutty right wing meme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_Mind
What fun the lunar right must have, endlessly recycling each others wacky theories, thinking they have reinforced their fantasies into a coherent world view.
I would like to see Abbott and Mark Latham jointly revive the Monster Raving Loony Party. Uniform – top hat and red swimmers. Only problem is that apparently it was hard to say whether Screaming Lord Sutch was kidding or not, whereas I am fairly sure Abbott and Latham are not kidding.
ReplyDeleteThis one's for you DP. A little light holiday reading. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteOn Camp Loon Pond
Our Dot found a reptile-free haven
To escape from their freedumb flag-wavin'
And daily she rested
In a campsite protected
From the likes of Dame Slap and Greg Craven
So the reptiles sent up a balloon
To spy on Dot's languid lagoon
But on gas they did crimp
And the wreck of their blimp
Lies over their flagship bestrewn...
Ta, Kez ... what a pity the poems are scattered in the comments. There really should be a collected edition...
DeleteThanks DP. I could start up a blog of collected ditties and call it The Puddle!
DeleteWhen do we get to see the first edition, Kez ?
DeleteI'll have to bone up on how to do a blog first GB!
Delete"...whether the onion muncher was the worst Prime Minister of the 21st century." Well, certainly the "worst PM" so far, but there's lots of 21C still to be traversed. After all, who knows how bad Dutton really would be, once he too gets the job. And we'll vote for him too, just the same as we voted for all the others of the preceding century.
ReplyDeleteLike, for instance, Churchill and Thatcher: now go back and really examine some history, and then assert that those two weren't every bit as bad, and in their own ways as crazy, as The Muncher. Fortunately, they were 'elsewhere', not here, but ...
So just as a discussion point, how bad was Fraser ? After all, it was his government that killed the first Medibank system - was that a good, sensible and sane thing to do ?
Thanks for taking up the challenge GB, and the pond will immediately concede that the head prefect should have been in the ring and a prime contender ...
Delete