In which the pond is able to spend a quiet Monday with the Caterist and the Major ...

 

For a terrifying moment, as the pond scanned the far right of the lizard Oz's digital edition this morning, it seemed like the pond might be forced into the company of Lord Downer, brooding about the UK riots and discovering an affinity with the rioters ...

The pond simply couldn't bear to waste screen caps on a man best known for his affinity with high heels and stockings... and pomposity and an uncanny ability to sound like Nigel Farage ...

...Something about these protests has struck a chord with the punters. It’s not that voters specifically blame the immigrants for the protests, they blame governments for pursuing mass migration programs and failing to integrate migrants into modern Britain.
Many Britons have been reluctant to speak out on these issues. They live in fear that the self-styled “progressive” left will condemn them as racists, fascists and Nazis. For years they and a compliant media have stifled any criticism of immigration and multiculturalism. As you can see if you follow X, the progressive modus operandi is not to debate issues but to pour invective on their victims confident it will shut them up. In Britain it has worked.
What is more, the public is suspicious that the white majority – that’s more than 80 per cent of the country – is being subjected to different standards from ethnic and other minorities. There’s an argument that the police turned a blind eye to acts of violence during the Black Lives Matter protests and allowed pro-Hamas supporters to act violently, yet when white people protest they vigorously enforce the law.
This allegation of two-tier policing may not necessarily be fair. After all, the police only enforce the laws that parliament makes and one of those laws – the Equality Act – imposes the concept of “protected characteristics” and one of the protected characteristics is race. In practice, the police often have been cautious to avoid the all-too-easy charge of racism.
The riots will quickly die down. But what won’t die down is the sense from one end of Britain to the other that both Labour and the Conservatives are set on changing the whole social and cultural character of the country.
It’s not that the British are racist. They’re not. After all, they’ve had an Asian prime minister, two black foreign secretaries and the frontrunner to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader is an ethnically African woman. They’re happy for their society to be multiracial, but what they don’t want it to be is deconstructed into a patchwork of cultural enclaves.
This notion of culturalism is nuanced. The British like many aspects of cultural diversity. They wouldn’t want to lose that. But they don’t want their traditions trashed or their institutions threatened by migrants who reject integration. Exactly the same phenomenon is pervasive throughout Europe.
It’s not ultimately about race. It’s about culture. And nothing has incited this sense of anger more than the progressive left elites who salami-slice society into competing tribes defined by their perceived degrees of victimhood.

There’s a very sharp lesson here for Australia. We’ve done better than Britain in resisting demands to subdivide our country into victims and oppressors, and we do have a relatively united sense of our national values. But we have to keep working at it. Beware those among us who are striving to destroy that unity and atomise Australia: hate preachers in western Sydney, the Greens and so on.

"And so on" cunningly contrived to avoid mentioning the braying of Lord Downer himself, the reptiles of the lizard Oz, Sky after dark, and the rabid pack of hounds regularly set loose in the Murdochian tabloids.

Nowhere did Lord find time to mention Uncle Elon, social media or traditional dying media. 

For that you have to turn to cartoons ...

Luckily the pond realised that this was Caterist day and the reptiles had simply been playing mind games and had buried the 'flood waters in quarries' whisperer for the sin of being too tedious.

The pond scouted around and found the Viktor Orbán lover and devotee of cash in the paw from the Department of Finance skulking ... and what a relief, rabbiting on in a way designed to keep the nation abed on a cold morning ...

Some might be concerned by the Caterist's own heroic efforts to decline any rewards from Australian taxpayers kindly donating money to the MRC and not having a bar of junkets to Hungary to simper over Orbán, but that's the nature of the beast ... spurning even a dime, willing to slave away on an oily rag, doing his climate science denialist duties, bashing the government, and sticking it to child care workers ...

There were a flurry of snaps accompanying the piece, including one terrifying snap of a child being monstered by an ancient relic ...

The pond confesses to not having the slightest interest in what the Caterist has to say, but better him than Lord Downer ...

Inevitably, it turns out that the Caterist is in search of a trad wife, and is keen to keep womyn in the kitchen, where they belong, though alas that doesn't seem to have penetrated his own home ...

Single-income families?

Apparently Ms Weisser is quadranting for free ...

Never mind, time for a final bash, and then the floodwaters in quarry whispering is done this day ... and the pond can repress the terrifying thought of the Caterist with children ...

Speaking of the market, John Naughton in The Observer directed the pond to John Gray: The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong in The New Statesman.

The mystical market was given a right royal going over ...

...Hayek was most original when he ­argued that the market is a means of discovering and transmitting information that is dispersed throughout society. It was this insight into the knowledge-creating function of markets that enabled him to formulate a decisive argument against central economic planning.

Generations of socialists have maintained that the failings of the Soviet economy were because of historical causes extraneous to the planning system: a lack of democracy rooted in tsarist traditions of despotism, the underdevelopment of the Russian economy when the Soviet system came into being, and Stalin’s deformation of Lenin’s supposedly more benign inheritance.

As Hayek perceived, none of these factors can account for the universal failings of planned economies, which have followed a similar pattern in countries as different as  Czechoslovakia and Mongolia, East Germany and Cuba. The fundamental reason for the failures of central economic planning is that economic knowledge cannot be centralised. More than the love of power or the inevitability of corruption, it is the limitations of human knowledge that make socialist planning an impossible dream. Here Hayek’s argument was unanswerable.

The trouble is that it also applies to unfettered market capitalism. No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that – unlike any other social institution – they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

When considering how to overcome the Great Depression, Hayek opposed Keynes-style fiscal stimulus for the same reason he opposed monetary expansion of the sort later advocated by his friend the American economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006). In attempting to generate recovery by macroeconomic engineering, both monetarism and Keynesianism required a knowledge of the economy that no one could possess. Unlike monetarism – with which it has sometimes been confused – the Austrian school of economics that Hayek promoted insists that the quantity of money cannot be measured precisely, and that expanding the money supply cannot reflate the economy in a sustainable way.

For Hayek, the causes of the Depression lay in earlier central bank policies of cheap money, which resulted in large-scale misallocation of capital. Because no central authority could grasp the shifting pattern of relative scarcities and prices, only the market could determine the right allocation. Accordingly, believing that misguided investments had to be liquidated, Hayek argued in the 1930s for policies that were more contractionary than those that were actually pursued. The task of government was to get out of the way and let the process of adjustment run its course.

If they had been adopted while the crash was under way, Hayek’s prescriptions would have made the Depression even worse than it proved to be – a fact he later admitted. But he never accepted Keynes’s core insight that large-scale economic discoordination could be the result of the workings of the market itself. For him it was always government intervention that accounted for market disequilibrium. More sceptical as well as more radical in his turn of mind, Keynes questioned the self-regulating powers of the market. His work on the theory of probability disclosed insuperable gaps in our knowledge of the future; all investment was a gamble, and markets could not be relied on to allocate capital rightly. There were booms and busts long before the emergence of modern central banking. Left to its own devices, the free market can easily end up in a dead end like that of the 1930s.

And so on, and it's only to suggest better ways to spend time than reading the Caterist.

While at the Graudian, the pond read the venerable Meade's New chair Kim Williams says ABC should be ‘last broadcaster standing’ and News Corp’s criticism is ‘unbalanced’. It began this way:

Kim Williams, the current chair of the ABC, wants the organisation to be “the last broadcaster standing” and one of his first acts has been to reverse the board’s decision to start reducing the corporation’s radio networks.

“It is not available to the ABC to simply withdraw a variety of broadcast services, like for example Radio National or ABC Classic or Triple J,” Williams told Guardian Australia. “They are part of our responsibility.”

ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, said last year it was inevitable that the audience on some AM services such as RN and NewsRadio will be so small “that we’ll look at rationalising that over time”.

In a broad-ranging interview last week Williams hit out at the ABC’s critics, saying News Corp’s obsession with the public broadcaster is “unbalanced and, at times, fairly unhinged” and should largely be ignored.

Unbalanced and unhinged? Could there be any better way to introduce the Major on a Monday?

As soon as the Major scribbles about the need to be prudent, the pond wishes that some wit had scribbled a line about journalists first needing to heal themselves ...

David Collier? He might sit well with readers of The Jerusalem Post, but the pond prefers Haaretz as a source, and by chance a few days ago Hanin Majadli wrote Over 110 Journalists Have Been Killed in Gaza. Their Israeli Counterparts Keep Silent, Too many Israeli journalists ascribe some measure of guilt to their counterparts in Gaza – to the point of considering them Nukhba force members who deserve to die (paywall).

Inter alia:

On the day when Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, it also assassinated Ismail al-Ghoul, a young journalist in Gaza for Al Jazeera. After his name was released, a battle of narratives erupted between Al Jazeera and Israel: Which was he more, a terrorist or a journalist?

According to the IDF's Spokesperson Unit, "A 2021 document retrieved from the Hamas terrorist organization's computers captured in the Gaza Strip lists thousands of activists in the organization's military wing and confirms that, as of 2021, al-Ghoul was an engineer for Hamas' Gaza brigade."

In a response released in several languages, Al Jazeera said that the claim by the Israeli army and intelligence was completely false. It said that "the Israeli occupation forces had previously abducted Ismail on March 18, 2024, during their raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, detaining him for a period of time before his release, which debunks and refutes their false claim of his affiliation with any organisation."

This battle of narratives echoes the debate from earlier in the war about journalists from international news agencies. Some of them helped document the October 7 massacre, and any involvement in the actual acts – and the extent to which the media companies knew about this – has never been fully clarified.

The question is: Does it even matter? And to whom? Either way, to Israel and the Israelis, Al Jazeera isn't a popular Arab world news network but "a propaganda branch for terrorism." And either way, for Israel and the Israelis, there are no innocents in Gaza – not women, not children, and certainly not journalists.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, over 110 reporters and media crew members have been killed in Gaza since October 7, a worse result than in World War II, the Korea War, the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq. This development doesn't get much attention because in Israel, including in the media, all journalists from Gaza – actually everybody in the Strip – are members of Hamas, its elite Nukhba force, murderers and rapists. Or at the very least, they're accomplices and supporters of terrorism.

What if these journalists are the Gazans' only way to broadcast their plight to the world? What if the rest of the world views these reporters as journalists risking their lives on the battlefield to get the story – the way journalists are supposed to – and they're having a hard time due to Israel's hermetic control over Gaza? Foreign journalists rarely go into Gaza, and anyone who enters must be closely accompanied by soldiers from the IDF Spokesperson's Unit.

Only a state in breach of international law would so closely monitor news reports about what's happening under its rule. Only a state that feels threatened by a free, independent media would consider the death of over 110 journalists "collateral damage."

With the number of dead in Gaza approaching 40,000, the notion that journalists, of all people, will be protected sounds particularly ludicrous. Reporters' efforts to identify themselves have failed to protect them, and there have been claims that journalists actually have been targeted by the army. The Israeli military officially denies that it views journalists in Gaza as targets, so why are so many of them getting killed?

Apparently, because they can be. Because most Israeli journalists are indifferent to the fate of their peers in Gaza, and too many of them ascribe some measure of guilt to Gazan journalists – to the point of considering them Nukhba force members who deserve to die.

This is why there hasn't been one petition against the killing of journalists in Gaza, not one demonstration in front of a single newsroom. Who will sign something like that? Anchorman-cum-hard-liner Dany Cushmaro? Yinon Magal and Shimon Riklin of Benjamin Netanyahu's mouthpiece, Channel 14? Even Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori is fully spouting Israel's messages.

Actually, what can you expect from a media that raises its future generation in Army Radio? Will these journalists save the day?

Never mind, on with the Major, who will likely never find that long lost Order of Lenin medal, let alone save the day...

If Al Jazeera - no hyphen required - is too much for the Major, he really should give Hareetz a go ...

Presumably the reptiles could afford to get the Major past the paywall, and then he might read all sorts of stories of an uncomfortable kind ...

And so on and on and on ... and so to the Major's final thoughts, to use that word loosely ...

Ah so the Major has heard of Haaretz, but being a ratbag of the far right kind, pays no attention and instead closes by indulging in a bit of ABC bashing ...

What to do with a narcissist gazing at his navel and fluff gathering? 

Yep, the pond must confess it had bit and had followed that last link, even though the pond realises that once you've booked into the reptile hive mind, hotel Murdochania, you can never leave.

Oh foolish pond, it was just the Major referencing the Major ... Major Major if you're of a Catch-22 mind ...

Meanwhile, on with the genocide ...

Oh boy, so that's the news today, and although the holes were rather small, they had to count them all, and now the Major knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall ...

On the upside, the reptiles and so the pond managed to ignore the United States, the French clock man and so on, and so, in closing, the pond was left to catch up with the immortal Rowe ...