There are some days that the nausea provoked by the reptiles in the pond is so deep that it's difficult to take out the textbooks and begin herpetology studies.
This is one of them ... the pond searched in vain for news of the ICJ. It looked high and low, starting with the front page of the tree killer edition ...
Nothing there, just more blather about taxes, and a truly nauseating bit of flag waving, and it was the same with the tree killer edition, with taxes and that nauseating flag waving at the centre yet again...
"Ned" was back to natter about teh taxes, and tech betrayal, but the pond didn't have the strength or the will, and over on the right was the dog botherer blathering about truth, when the man himself is a perfect liar on many issues, not least climate science ...
As for the line about "nasty protests", the entire point of an alleged democracy is that as well as flag-waving, you're allowed to protest on sundry issues if that's how you feel ... without the reptiles or a mango Mussolini threatening to lock you up.
In a word: nausea.
Down below in what passes for a commentary section, the litany was much the same ...
They imported Pom Brendan to talk about the ABC? And the lessor Lesser is what passes for news of Gaza? And the lizard Oz editorialist rabbits on about taxes, while the oscillating fan parades his indignation, gone fully reptile with blather about words being utterly worthless, because, you know, the filthy rich ...
Meanwhile, on another planet, if you happen to read the Graudian's summary of events for the day, here's a few matters omitted, overlooked, ignored and sent to the cornfield ...
And so on, and the pond could do the same for the war in Ukraine, or climate science, or whatever, and the pond suspects that these days, as well as wilful ignorance, lies, dissembling and disinformation, it's what the reptiles leave out that's just as important as the bigotry and fear-mongering they offer in their actual coverage ...
Never mind, such is the agitation in the pond's empty stomach - any Technicolor yawn can leave the body unsettled - the pond decided to do only two reptiles and leave any other low hanging fruit for the morrow ...
The dog botherer had to be studied, of course, not just because he was favoured with the far right top perch in the digital edition, or for his standard issue, patented, off the shelf reptile bashing of the ABC, but because he's always a sterling example of lies, distortions and misrepresentations...
One problem for the pond is that the pond simply can't stand Kim Williams and these days never watches the ABC ... with a note in
Crikey at the bottom of a
story about Kim Williams (paywall) explaining why ...
brucehassan: My suggestion to Mr Williams would be to begin with dialing-down the endless, mindless nationalism of ABC TV. If I hear “We are one” one more time I’ll chuck something at the telly. The Australian continent is home to numerous regions and cultures, certainly much more than the south eastern urban culture beloved by the ABC, and we are not one.
The pond still enjoys the odd bit of telly, and has decided that the best solution is simply not to watch the ABC, for fear of another bout of chucking or hurling...
But these are personal issues, and shouldn't get in the way of study ...
Actually the encumbrance on Williams will be his arrogant narcissism and his belief that he's the smartest man in the room, and his inclination to fits of anger, and all the rest, which managed to upset the applecart at News Corp and in sundry y'artz organisations, but again the pond has been distracted from its studies, with the reptiles also seeking to distract by parading assorted snaps throughout the dog botherer piece ...
How did the mango Mussolini get into the yarn? Well now he's the heir apparent, even the remotest corners of the empire are intent on a cleansing, a rehabilitation, a refurnishing, a reburnishing ...
Meanwhile ...
Sadly the chances of either the ABC or the lizard Oz running
this kind of story, to be found in WaPo (paywall), are between nil and zero ...
It's quite a long and deeply depressing read ...
... and so on and of course it's a distraction from the narrow world-view served up by the reptiles ...and the pond just knew that at some point the dog botherer would revert to talk of "climate alarmism" ...
And there you go, the home of group think about climate science preaches into a vacuous void about group think.
Usually the pond would bite with some news about actual climate science, but the pond feels like offering a few more samples of that WaPo story ... just because it's there ...
Meanwhile back at the lies and disinformation and propaganda machine, reality never speaks for itself, reality is hidden, tucked away, kept out of sight, for fear of disturbing the angertainment machine...
At least irony is never dead ... reading yet another attack on the ABC, with inverted commas deployed in the trope about News Corp "attacks", and the dog botherer suggesting this was just a matter of them hardening the fuck up ...apparently unaware that the trope of News Corp attacks just scored a new entry ...
Luckily the pond had done its duty and there was just a short gobbet to go ...
Other news not mentioned by the reptiles?
Good old Faux Noise ...
Well it was easier than biting on the dog botherer overlooking the mango Mussolini's pandering to Vlad the impaler, another sociopathic narcissist doing down a country, not that you'd know anything about that by reading the lizard Oz ...
And so to the bonus, which just happens to be a serve of the Angelic one, a case study of how Catholic fundamentalism can warp a mind for life ...
White guilt? Perhaps a more useful emotion than white nationalism and white supremacy, reptile style ...
Oh and the teaching of lies to children, such as that stealing the children was simply a welfare measure, "sometimes, forcibly" deployed ...
In the reptile world, if you keep lying to children, you can keep the child molestation in order and the brown paper tributes to Catholic coffers flowing ...
Now for a ripping example of a condescending, paternalistic, colonialist mind set ... (should that be maternalistic? The pond doesn't want to malign the generality of mothers, just the bigoted ones) ...
The pond notes that there's a goodly serve of manipulation by ideological bias, and blather about brainwashing starting early, and the pond wishes it had a reliable source for that line about giving you a child when (s)he's seven, it variously being attributed to the Jesuits or Aristotle ...
It's bizarre when you pause for a nanosecond, the reptile astonishment that there might be some people who care about the fate of the planet, and thereby the fate of children, or what's happening in the current genocide in Gaza, or the never-ending genocide and stealing of children in Ukraine, but remember, instead of "ugly protests", the reptile approach is to despatch unsettling, discomforting thoughts to the cornfield ... possibly with the occasional pious thought or prayer ...
And now it's about time to send the Angelic one to the cornfield after a final gobbet ...
Ah, Patrick O'Farrell. The more that the pond learns about the sources for the reptiles, the more the pond understands.
As well as deploring oral history - in short the entire tradition celebrated by the reptiles as the foundations of Greek and Roman Western Civilisation, not limited to but including Herodotus, always willing to relate a yarn he'd overheard somewhere on his travels - O'Farrell was notorious for preaching about black armbands, as noted
here ... (a pdf offering different perspectives on black armband history) ...
...Other historians not traditionally aligned with the Labor side of politics, such as Professor Patrick O'Farrell, tend to agree with John Howard that the 'guilt school of Australian history has gone too far'. According to Professor O'Farrell, as reported by Mark Uhlmann, 'there should be no apologising for murder or mistreatment, but even in such cases a historian has an obligation, using the tools and intellectual rigour of his trade, to understand why things happened. An individual or society who does one bad thing, is not usually wholly bad. A historian must also look for the redemptive features'.
Professor O'Farrell emphasised that it was the duty of the historian not to apportion blame or guilt but to develop 'empathy with historical figures' and look at the past with compassion. The historian was not the judge of human error but the person who bore a social responsibility to explore the stories of human endeavour in all their various shades and colours.
Time for a compassionate study of Adolf or the mango Mussolini? Time to develop deep empathy for Benji or Vlad the impaler?
Don't worry, there's a 'leet reptile historian ready and waiting ... because there'll be Catholic pie in the sky in the bye and bye ...
And so to a couple of cartoons left over from yesterday's celebrations ... strangely, both still relevant ...
Shanahana: "...an alarming example of how a historically complex and controversial episode could be reinterpreted in a child's mind, almost as a bad fairytale." So tell us, Shana, at what age do religions - and especially the Catholic Christian variety - begin religious "instruction", and what are those kids taught ?
ReplyDeletePS: there's nothing the least "controversial" about the stolen children affair, it was part of a deliberate policy of forced "assimilation" of aboriginal children with the stated intent of terminating the aboriginal race.
My memory of a priest giving religious instruction at my state school after classes was so frighting that our mother removed us from the father Dunworth as we were being terrorised with what he was telling how we would be punished and sent hell if we did not abide by his teaching, we were so afraid of him we were having nightmares so we were removed from those classes and when old father Dunworth came to tell our mother that we should return to the lessons our mother order him of the property incidently we were a family of 8 kids and a father who was killed in Trokuk.
DeleteThe pond did appreciate those reminders. After being told at a very tender age by nuns about the fate of sinners, the pond was haunted for years by a vision of a carbon-encrusted soul saturated in sin like a chicken nugget in a deep fryer.
DeleteEach and every sin whether mortal or venial would see the blazing white soul (for some reason it looked like a sacred heart) gradually encrusted in black, until it would become nothing better than a dark lump of coal, destined to burn for all eternity in hellfire.
Truly not even the wicked witch in Snow White had the same impact on the pond. But that's how the tykes worked, scare little children shitless, load them up with guilt and shame, then pump them full of lies, and judging by the Angelic one, that's how they still work ...
Isn't it wonderful how, despite all that, there's at least as much sin and evil amongst Catholics as there is in the general populace which doesn't have such threats thrust upon them. It must be a joy worshipping an omnipotent, omniscient 'God-Trinity' that has absolutely zero effect in the observable universe.
DeleteSimilar to Anony's and DP's accounts of scaring the bejesus into little kids I had a similar experience to Anony. At the age of eight I also attended an after-school religious instruction session...but only once. It was a state school in Adelaide in the early 60s and from memory it must have been some kind of evangelist recruitment drive. The guy talking to us may have been a priest but he looked more like a car salesman and his first question to his young audience was "Who wants to see gud?" (I think he was a Yank but he may have been Irish).
DeleteOf course, all us excited little mites instantly put our hands up, so he proceeded to relate a story of a man who once called on gud to reveal himself. But gud was angry that this man needed to actually see him rather than simply believe in him so he sent a little insect which flew into the man's eye and burrowed into his brain. The man then went insane and died! You can imagine our stunned response.
This gud salesman then told us to never, ever, ask to see gud or the same thing would happen to us...we were to believe the bible as gud's word and never question his existence. I remember being terrified by this story at the time, but that guy actually did me a favour. I started thinking about gud quite deeply after that and had an incredible realisation one afternoon (at the age of eight) that this "gud" person did not really exist, therefore I had no need to see him and would thus escape being driven insane and ultimately killed by one of his insect assassins. I feel like one of the lucky ones.
Yair but "God's assassins" can't really kill an immortal soul - which all of God's chilluns supposedly have - can they ? So, yes, they depart this vale of sins and tears but only to live on in some part of God's universe for eternity. Don't they ?
DeleteWow, to have achieved enlightenment at such an early age. The pond began to suspect something was up with this version of god when the pond innocently poked at a bit of wafer caught between teeth, and got a sound whack across the chops from a nun for daring to touch the body of Christ. The pond had thought it was just like a bit of stray bread, but it turned out it was part of a cannibalistic ritual involving the eating of actual flesh. The pond was further peeved one time looking around to see who was at the back of the church and copped a whack across the chops from another Dominican for daring to look away from the lord, apparently visiting Tamworth at the very time and place that would have exhausted Santa Claus.
DeleteAll the pond knew was that it had passed two more mile markers on the eternal road to an eternity in hellfire. It was reading James Joyce and discovering that the same hellfire routine was common in Ireland that helped finish the pond off ...
At least you got there in the end DP. God bless James Joyce! I suppose I had a head start in that I wasn't Catholic and had parents who never went to church and never discussed religion. The only reason I went to the after school session was because a schoolmate had invited me. Later on in first year high school we had something called "Religious Instruction" where, in our very first lesson, a certain Brother Lawrence rammed a boy's head into a locker door because he was talking in the opening prayer. Afterwards the priest was never seen again and R I mysteriously disappeared from our timetable.
Delete:) We did have much fun later in high school attending the after school session set aside for tykes, a half hour of torture for students and priest. He was an extremely corpulent Irishman (jokes were made about deadly sins) who only wanted to get to the golf course as quickly as possible for a round of golf or more likely a go on the poker machines accompanied by many beers. As there was no other way to fill in the time, theology became the talking point, and Christopher Hitchens himself would have been proud of the assorted thorny issues that were raised. Likewise, for some reason at some point the sessions were abandoned, but they were great fun while they lasted, and the pond can still remember the red face growing redder as the voice grew louder ...
DeleteVenkatesh Rao calls it "ambitious narrative re-engineering".
ReplyDeleteDP says "here's a few matters omitted, overlooked, ignored and sent to the cornfield"
Here is a theory.
Venkatesh Rao has a post today explaining Modi "as a consequence of this sort of ambitious narrative re-engineering" where the known becomes unknown.- and the reptiles (chunda) - explaining via the Irish, now seems to be all "Unknown Knowns" time for tyrants - and reptiles - forgetting the past 500yrs to promote nationalism / theocracy. Substitute for India - LimitedNews, LNP, Reptiles, GOP / Trump, Xi China. ... etc etc.
"Unknown Knowns"
...
"The Irish case is a sobering small-scale warning about the road that lies ahead for India as a consequence of this sort of ambitious narrative re-engineering. Another relevant quote from the review that hits a very disturbing nerve for me:
"The country’ s apparent strengths—its population’s ethnic and religious homogeneity, its battle-scarred unity against the old colonial aggressor, the romantic brilliance of its self-mythologizing—were the very forces that were pushing it toward disruptive upheavals. O’Toole is almost Hegelian in his understanding of history as a critical process in which eras helplessly recruit the agents of their own undoing. Religion and nationalism, the cross and the clover, promised a timeless stability but were actually subversive forces. They were subversive because, despite the rhetoric of confidence, they were anxiously unstable, held together by a will to hypocrisy; when the deficits of this hypocrisy overwhelmed the benefits, the will began to wane.
"This lovely paragraph could have been written about Modi’s India at this moment.
...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/01/24/unknown-knowns/
Scary. Really scary.
As is Shanahana and the rest of koolaid kulcha.
Kenny on Anderson: “an ABC lifer who started off stocking kitchens and sorting mail in the Adelaide studios more than 30 years ago.”
ReplyDeleteLooks like those workers who aspire to better their careers are now viewed with contempt, with Chris Kenny’s only argument against Anderson an attempt at a nasty put-down of a person who has achieved something he hasn’t – a permanent job.
Then we have: “Sound journalism needs to be unabashed about valuing democracy over anarchy, liberty over tyranny and accountability over intimidation.”
It would take too long to cite the reptiles who have failed these core values that Kenny lists as necessary for impartiality and objectivity, but I gather the reptiles’ argument is that a publicly funded media outlet needs to be balanced and present all views, but a privately owned media outlet is not obliged to do so and therefore, one must conclude from this, that the latter’s journalists can favour tyranny over liberty, anarchy over democracy and intimidation over accountability and so this explains NewsCorp.
As for suggesting the ABC hardening up to attacks, perhaps those Kenny claims are being attacked by the ABC (all the cases he cites are supposed attacks against right-wing politicians or staffers: Christian Porter, Bruce Lehrmann, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and a Coalition MP) should harden up too; they are political operatives after all.
I laughed at Kenny’s comment that “The Post’s coverage of Trump obsessed over the man rather than the substance…”. Well, Trump - all puffery and hoop-la - hasn’t got any substance, so the journalists just had to settle with what was left.
It's like that pronouncement from the Bromancer that I quoted the other day, Anony: "Trump is a temperamentally unstable, pathological liar" and yet they love him anyway. Nor would Trump be the first like that which people lved and followed - all the way into a Russian winter in some cases.
DeleteNot that we can act righteously disinterested - just think: Abbott then Turnbull then Morrison. Is that any better than Trump. Or, if we go back a little further: Holt then Gorton then McMahon, yeah.
Angela Shanahan shows real Christian spirit when she sneers at the ATAR scores of teachers. (One wonders what the current ATAR scores of journalists for NewsCorp are and what exactly Angela's actual scores for whatever she's got are. )But who knew private school teachers had such low scores and, more particularly, that “they themselves were steeped in ideology by other less than brilliant education theorists and academics”. Now readers may say Kevin Donnelly and Greg Craven deserve to be described as less than brilliant, but how far back does this ideological indoctrination go? Surely Mary McKillop was not less than brilliant?!
ReplyDeleteYair, and what's an ATAR anyway ?
DeleteWhy You Should NOT Aim For a High ATAR
https://artofsmart.com.au/study/dont-need-high-atar/
After all: "Your ATAR Isn’t Everything". Some might say it isn't even anything.
Timely link for my prodigy anon.
DeleteThanks.
Bazza: "Crikey… let’s legislate for Australia Day to be celebrated 365 days per year. I mean why raise the flag only on the 26th January?"
ReplyDeleteYou see, every day is Australia Day:
Dutton should legislate on Australia Day and Woolies boycott
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/dutton-should-legislate-on-australia-day-and-woolies-boycott,18260Dutton should legislate on Australia Day and Woolies boycott
GB - we had so much fun yesterday that I was unwilling to add accounts of my friends of the accounts of the wages of sin instilled into them, particularly by nuns, in the 40s and 50s. As others observed - the impressions of that are still too easy to recall, even if they have no salutary effect on those friends.
ReplyDeleteAmusing observation from 'Sky' last night (amusement not readily available on Sky) was the steadily sour Steve Price and Nicholas Reece. I did consult the 'Wiki' on Reece, and figure he is acceptable to Sky because he is apostate, but that is not the issue.
Reece spun along about attending a citizenship ceremony, what a joy it was to behold people who had made their way here and were now taking citizenship. Declaration - I have had similar experience through friends whose citizenship ceremonies (NOT always on January 26) I attended. All good there. He and Price then babbled on about how this was the greatest country in the world, these people were signing-on for all the wonderful things that came with citizenship, and why would anyone, ANYone, want to swear allegiance to any other country on this planet?
Being steadily sour Price, don't expect any sense of irony - I was parsing what they were saying, and applying it to a certain media proprietor, who was quite prepared to sell his birthright here for a pot of message - and the chance to make more money out of his choice of message, to be imposed on another country of his choice.
But, of course, his minions here can continue to lecture us on 'patriotism', and a few thousand of us are still ready to pay good money to receive such lectures.
According to my (unresearched) understanding, the situation was that America imposed, and still imposes, a foreign ownership of media limit of 20% whereas Australia doesn't (not after Howard's media manipulations anyway), so Rupert basically had to become American to reach his desired ownership level there whilst retaining his ownership as a now foreigner here.
DeleteBut hey, becoming an Australian citizen does confer some 'benefits', like having a vote in one of the very few nations that has secret compulsory preferential voting. And look what that saved us from:
How Australia's compulsory voting saved it from Trumpism
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/08/how-australias-compulsory-voting-saved-it-from-trumpism
Kenny, along with the rest of the Murdoch bloviators, tries to gaslight readers by continually claiming that the whole Trump/Russia scandal has been totally debunked.
ReplyDeleteThe Mueller report detailed Russia’s efforts to assist the Trump campaign in 2016, revealing that senior members of the Trump campaign such as Paul Manafort had Russian contacts which they lied about. The bi-partisan Senate investigation came to the same conclusion. Nothing in Durham’s report changes these findings, nor the numerous convictions resulting from the Mueller investigation.
Oh it's just the workings of a few reptile rules, mate:
Delete1. If I don't ever mention it again, then it never really happened
2. If I do mention it again a few times, then it must have happened.
You can see how those rules work together in the case of the 'Trump/Russia scandal'.
"The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said he hopes Israel will comply with the international court of justice’s ruling."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/27/australia-urged-to-reconsider-support-for-israel-after-icj-ruling
“Any other day, this would have been a major headline: Israel submits evidence of UN employees’ complicity with Hamas,” Levy wrote on X."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/27/australia-pauses-un-agency-funding-as-staff-investigated-for-suspected-role-in-7-october-attack-on-israel
Just look at that shot of the Palestinian family beside the Egyption border. Now there's a wall!
ReplyDelete