In which the pond red cards old favourites, but Mein Gott, there's always the Lynch mob for safe haven ...

 

For those wondering what Dame Slap might have to say about the Lehrmann matter, keep wondering. 

Apparently Lehrmann didn't leak to her any wild tales of coke and hookers and so today's serve was plain dudders Rice, with no added spicy Dame Slap sauce ...

The pond remains righteous in its desire to avoid going down that Lehrmann rabbit hole ...

Over on either side of the yarn of coke and hookers came standard tales of reptile green rage, with the far right top spot easily being chambered by Geoff ... while down below the reptiles finally noticed the slaughter in the killing fields, though apparently it's all unintentional ... and has only been triggered by an Australian death, and never mind the thousands of other innocents slaughtered ...

The story of the reptile green obsession continued below the fold ...

Dame Slap was safely consigned to blathering about the DEI brigade, while the bromancer attempted to divert attention from the slaughter by resorting to blather about the axis of weevils. 

The rat from the deep north was still talking of the war with China by Xmas, while Tom upheld the greenie rage by slavering at the mouth about the Great Green Society ...

Luckily the immortal Rowe was to hand to remind the pond of who is currently spreading the killing fields ...

As for all the greenie bashing, code for the new breed and style of climate science denialism in the lizard Oz, the pond was reminded of a story in Crikey by Christopher Warren, Never mind the science, News Corp has strengthened its climate denialism machine, Climate crisis denial can come in many forms — and Murdoch's empire has all bases covered. (paywall).

Instead of attempting to cover all the greenie-bashing this day, in lieu of quoting Tom et al, please permit the pond to quote the history per Warren:

The News Corp climate denial machine — all those cogs in its opinion pages finely tuned to reverse Aesop’s fable and repeatedly croak out: “No wolf here!” — has a problem. Extreme weather events have made it all but impossible to ignore the climate wolf threatening to blow our houses down.
No worries, it’s time to call in the ideology engineers for a bit of message realignment. With just a spot of tinkering, the machine has cranked out two new talking points for the US company’s loyal political wing in the Liberal and National Parties. These are the “ute tax” and the “absolute travesty” of the aesthetics of offshore wind farms.
They’ve reengineered the underlying denialism, too. Sure, they say now, the climate may be changing, but it’s not our fault. It’s not, as the cloistered academics would say, “anthropogenic”. 
If global heating is not caused by humans burning fossil fuels, why would humans be able to do anything about it? (And, just in case, why not go, umm, nukular?)
This so-called “attribution” denialism accepts the effect while denying the cause. It’s long been part of the denialist toolkit (remember sun spots?), along with what Australia’s leading analyst of denialism, John Cook, calls denying the trend (“it’s just not happening”) and denying the impact (“it’s not making any difference anyway”).
“Attribution” has always been the weakest form of denialism, raising doubts rather than definitively rejecting. But as a recent US study found, its danger lies in being the gateway drug to a more full-blown repudiation of the science itself.
And the guide at the gate ushering them through? Why Fox News, of course, and the grab bag of right-wing media voices following on behind. 
Rupert Murdoch’s bold 2007 commitment to zero corporate emissions (under, it was said, urging from his then likely heir James) was short lived. Once the global right embraced denialism as a core strategy, his media outlets, particularly here in Australia, quickly pivoted. 
From Abbott’s “absolute crap” moment in 2009, it became central to News Corp’s editorial positioning. A 2013 study by the University of Technology Sydney found that the company’s then two largest papers –Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun in Melbourne — were overwhelmingly hostile to climate change, with more than 60% of articles on the subject either outright rejecting the science or raising doubts about it.
In 2014, even the normally cautious Press Council felt compelled to express “considerable concern” about inaccuracies in the company’s coverage of data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 
Shrug. “Whatever happened to global warming?” the company’s Wall Street Journal insouciantly asked later that year.
Why did climate denial suddenly become a touchstone for the global right? After all, when Rupert was pumping zero emissions, John Howard seemed to have been dragged reluctantly by his then environment minister Malcolm Turnbull to the idea of an emission trading scheme. The following year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain mouthed similar support.
Follow the money. Fossil fuel corporates and the foundations they fund together with corrupt petro-states built a climate change denial countermovement. Surprising, I know, but here in Australia too.
As we’re discovering again with “ute tax”, offshore wind farms and largely astro-turfed protests against solar on farmland, this denialist countermovement has built its protests around neoliberal, anti-regulatory talking points. It’s been tagged “the anti-reflexivity thesis“, which is the argument that denialism is standing up for industrial capitalism.
It appeals to a certain old-style machismo — the good ol’ days of physical, manual jobs that matter for poorly educated men (and to the regional communities built around them).
It was this thesis that Abbott captured in three words: “Axe the tax!”
Now, the Liberal-National-News Corp coalition is having another go at the same old play. But, suddenly, it’s finding the going that much harder. 
Continued heat records have shattered denials of the trend, while bushfires, floods and mass extinctions are shattering the comfort of impact denialism. The enduring attribution denialism is proving just too weak to sustain the right’s countermovement.
In October 2021, in the wake of the IPCC report that definitively linked extreme events like Australia’s bushfires to global heating, News Corp attempted to shift to talk of “real practical solutions”  (unsuccessfully as it quickly turned out). It coincided with Canberra’s political gallery having one of its regular collective hope-over-experience frissons when Morrison (remember him?) committed to net-zero by 2050 (insert: smiley face) devoid of any practical measures (insert: sad face).
Now, about 30 months later, we’re back where we started. The only change? Right-wing media and the political parties they support seem determined to leap over the science to a fact-free denial in practice.

Well yes, and cue today's exercise in greenie-bashing ...

Meanwhile, the pond decided to hand both the bromancer and Dame Slap red cards.

The bro can stay off the field until he has some insight into the killing fields, while the pond is standing back and standing by for Dame Slap to finally reveal her relationship with Lehrmann. It could take a little time ...

Iin the interim, there's a few distractions to be found ... with the reptiles attempting to slip Mein Gott's latest effort through without the pond noticing, but Mein Gott, what would a day be without Mein Gott ...

Now some might think it pretty thin gruel and obvious, what with it being served up with an abundance of snaps, and much talk of woke and freedumb boy, but Mein Gott, take your pleasures where you find them ...

Mein Gott, the weevils of woke, and there were so many mentions that the pond was overwhelmed, while the snaps had to be bundled together ...

Then it was on with Mein Gott's weird obsession with the woke ...

The pond can't forsake its recently established tradition, it simply must follow Godwin's scientifically established law ...

Mein Gott, that must include Mein Gott - please don't blame the pond for pointing it out, it's just science - and better still, it involved Freedumb boy ...

The pond bundled up Mein Gott's tears and wondered if they might make an exceptional addition to recent snake oil offerings ... say the orange Jesus's bible, with bonus vial of Mein Gott tears ...

So that's it for Freedumb boy, Mein Gott has spoken, and all that remains is to celebrate Erica ...

Naturally the pond wanted to maintain the woke rage, but with Dame Slap red carded, and the pond not wanting to talk about the axis of weevils with the bro, who could act as a bonus?

Never to fear, the Lynch mob is here, and is he ready for a lynching or what ...

The pond believes that the Godwin's Law noted above can be taken as read, though really, such is the dire extremity of the complete wokeness, that traditional cartoon should also be invoked ...

Woke, woke, woke and here's a cartoon the Lynch mob would surely enjoy ...

Mein Gott, give the pond some more of the Lynch mob, lower casing the Voice, as is the form required in the lizard Oz ...

At this point the reptiles started slipping in a couple of snaps ...

That snap of dark Brandon set the Lynch mob right off ...

Dear sweet lord, must the Lynch mob remind the pond that students are running up a HECS debt to listen to him, which will take generations to pay off, when they simply might pay their shekels to the Emeritus Chairman to get a serve of Lynch mob wisdom ...

They might also learn to love the orange Jesus ...

Sorry, the pond just had to slip in that reminder of the best of the anti-woke brigade ...

Safetyism?

The pond realises that mangling the English language is the way to get ahead when you want to blather about coddling, but it triggered the pond, and sure enough there was John Warner back in 2020 scribbling Safetyism Was Never Real ... inter alia ...

If safetyism is a thing, its true avatar is President Donald Trump, whose first act after inauguration was to send his press secretary out to lie about the crowds on the National Mall. The teargassing of peaceful protesters from near the White House so Donald Trump could stage a photo op in front of a church while holding a Bible was explicitly designed to soothe his ego, following reports of a brief stay in an underground White House bunker as protesters massed outside the building.

Donald Trump’s inability to withstand even the slightest criticism without lashing out is a hallmark of his presidency. It has largely been normalized as a matter of Trump’s style or politics, rather than pathologized as Haidt and Lukianoff do with “iGen,” but the pattern is clear.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is another example of someone who decries the pernicious influence of safetyism while cocooning himself in a protective bubble. In a 2017 commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, Stephens decries the existence of so-called safe spaces on campuses, ultimately exhorting students to “Get out of your own safe spaces. Define what your intellectual comfort zone is -- and leave it. Enhance your tolerance for discordant voices. Narrow your criteria for what’s beyond the pale. Read the authors or watch the talking heads with whom you disagree. Treat those disagreements as a whetting stone to sharpen your own arguments. Resist the temptation to call people names.”

In 2019, after David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University, joked about Stephens being the metaphoric “bedbug” at The New York Times (as the Times offices were being afflicted by the actual pests), Stephens emailed both Karpf and a GWU provost in what can only be read as an attempt at using his platform and power to intimidate Karpf.

When this failed to yield Stephens’s desired results, he wrote an entire column as an ex post facto justification over his hurt feelings arguing (sans evidence) that any bedbug reference was inherently anti-Semitic, while implying that Karpf (who is Jewish) as least had Nazi sympathies.

Following the contretemps, Stephens accepted an invitation to debate Karpf at the George Washington campus, but later canceled when his insistence that the event be closed to the public was rejected.

Why is this not viewed as an example of safetyism?

Never mind, here's a few things to avoid in pursuit of safetyism ...Lynchism if you will ...

Yep, follow the Lynch mob and lose control of your body and maybe invest in a meme stock - love the cheap bubbles and the tulips - but it's all good right, and it certifies you're anything but woke.

And with that, the pond finally reached safe harbour, with just one gobbet of the Lynch mob to go ...

Luckily the pond this day has managed to avoid the world the Lynch mob has created ... the genocides, the climate science denialism,  and the unhappy portents of a most problematic future for the planet, and has left the hard yards to the cartoonists, and as usual the infallible Pope has obliged ...