This week has been a long, slow grind towards the Sunday meditation, but the pond can look back with satisfaction at finally achieving the state of "meme aware" ... (paywall)
Sure, the pond has never heard of the young things meme mocked, and will never see the movie that inspired the meme, but the pond is officially meme aware.
By the weekend the pond had also begun to slowly realise that it had stopped hitting itself on the head with a hammer... or perhaps it just dawned on the pond that nattering "Ned" had disappeared into the ether, with his last appearance back on 3rd August scribbling furiously about AUKUS.
The pond also idly wondered about the bromancer, but that could only be solved by a late Sunday arvo meditation.
The pond never looks a reptile gift in the mouth, and if that means that the Sunday meditation has to be devoted to old faithfuls gushing away, so be it. Familiarity might lead to contempt, or to complete indifference.
The Angelic one was first off the block, but the days of raging about (North) Calvary hospital now feel so long ago ... there seemed to be some sort of attempt at tolerance in the air ...
Well, you can't assimilate Catholics, that's an observable fact, and as for Gaza, nothing to see or report there ... not even the torture camps ...
And so on and on, but no need to read Haaretz, this is going to be a laid-back Sunday ...
Here the pond can only speak from personal experience. There's little doubt that the pond has been dangerously radicalised by the lizard Oz and the Murdochian tabloids, and the only way to exorcise the radicalisation has been to slog away at a blog for over a decade. The Angelic one must take some personal responsibility for this suffering ...
Ah yes, Gaza ...
And that brought the pond to the final gobbet ...
This being 'toon day, that had to deserve another 'toon ...
Oh yes, dangerously radicalised ... as only a condescending Catholic fundamentalist can manage.
Prattling Polonius also seemed relatively benign ...
Yes, it was time for pedantic Polonius to roll out a learned explanation with his expert prattle...
The good news? Nah, not all the psephological stuff.
Polonius has taken to watching Sky News, hunkered down like a mad uncle, hovering over the telly, and seemingly he's abandoned the ABC ...
This will bear watching.
In the meantime, the pond made its usual fatal mistake of clicking on the link ...
And so on and so forth, and the story didn't seem to amount to a hill of beans, while the pond remained fixated on the sudden, unexpected absence of the ABC ...
Spoiler alert, the cardigan wearers went MIA in the next round of psephological stuff ...
At this point the reptiles slipped in a video using the same shot as was at the head of that linked story ...
Polonius had only one gobbet to go, and the pond was getting desperate.
The gobbet opened with more blather about Sky News, and there hadn't been a single mention of the absence of conservatives on the ABC.
Then a sigh of relief .. why on earth did the pond think Polonius would stop listening to RN and the likes of PK ...
He might have gone soft, but he knows that anything said is likely to be doubtful, up against the astonishing insights and wisdom he has to offer ...
The pond has read many efforts by Polonius, but this palaver surely has to be high in the list of his most soporific efforts.
The evidence? The entire column suggests that achieving a state of mind-numbing tedium was the main point of the exercise.
And so to the bonus, and in lieu of "Ned" and with the bromancer reserved for a late arvo post, the pond decided it would offer up a WSJ outing, as refracted through the lizard Oz.
The pond makes no excuse for the shamelessness of the exercise. The pond had a goodly supply of cartoons to hand and needed some verbiage as spacing for them... and this did the job nicely ...
The pond wasn't the only one to shamelessly seize on the chance to use the verbiage as spacer.
The reptiles seized the chance to fill the yarn full to the gills with little click bait videos, some as ancient as the Musk interview ...
If the pond was going to do a Musk, it would settle for a cartoon of the two teenagers ...
Yes, the pond is on the way to a 'toon-led Sunday recovery ...
Surely not, surely having a bunch of Deadheads is entirely the point ...
Henninger manages a tremendous ability to act as a coach ...
There are however net gains to living in an alternative reality ...
Any more advice to the Mango Mussolini, Coach?
Yes, he just needs to chill and be himself... he doesn't have any psychological problems at all ...
Everything he says is full of stunning insights and empathy for others ...
Suckers and losers up against a beautiful woman, what's not to like ... and speaking of bone spurs ...
Ah yes, the aged beast that stalks the country has a fully stable set of beliefs - he's a stable genius - and he never stumbles, and if you believe that, the pond has the town hall in Martin Place to sell you ...
All that was left was a little more weirdness, because while some think it's been overdone, you can never over do it ...
Indeed, indeed, makes a huge amount of sense ... in a very weird sort of way ...
Just felt the need to post these comments re... "The gobbet opened with more blather about Sky News, and there hadn't been a single mention of the absence of conservatives on the ABC."
ReplyDeleteFrank Wilhoit 03.22.18 at 12:09 am
"There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
And in the same post "Cranky Observer" quotes in reply to marcel@5:02
"A peasant found a lamp with a genie that promised him one wish, with the proviso that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. After a moment's thought, the peasant said, "Take away one of my eyes."
The peasant must have been trump's neighbor.
"Backwash of pseudophilosophy" - that one is going to get reused!
Delete"Well, you can't assimilate Catholics, that's an observable fact..." No, I guess you can't at that, though I reckon High CofE is about the same. But "...an idea of assimilation is not viable" is a weird thing for Shanahanna to say.
ReplyDeleteOf course "assimilation" is a necessity: refugees and immigrants alike must, at the very least "assimilate" the local laws and regulations and hopefully just some of the language for starters. Like sending their kids to school - yes, even the female ones. Getting a local driving licence too and driving on the left-hand side of the road if they need to drive. All those various forms of 'assimilation' are simply compulsory.
But for more complete "assimilation", well, agreed that we've never really managed that. Unless "assimilation" is taken, as it always is, as a two way street. So when lots of Italian and Greek refugees and immigrants turned up after WWII in Melbourne, it wasn't that they "assimilated" our meat and three veg style home dinners, it was that we assimilated pasta, pizza and Greek salad and assorted other edibles that improved our way of life. And I'd have to say, after all this time, that we 'assimilated' coffee, and wine and even ouzo into our lives. No more 'fourpenny dark' joints in the laneways of Melbourne, wine was opened from regular bottles on the dinner table.
And we even 'assimilated' to the extent of inventing the wine cask so that we could conveniently carry some grog to parties without having to lug a half-dozen beer bottles (with another half dozen in the back of the ute).
So it goes.
Anyway, according to Shanna, we now have the "Muslim vote". Really ? And this has led to what exactly ? Sure Fatima Payman has left the Labor Party, but then I do recall when a significant portion of the "Catholic vote" also left the Labor Party and started a whole new thing called the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Do we all remember that ?
GB - to me, Rupert and Dutts are simply following well established Oz tradition. In the 60s and 70s, it was 'The Bulletin' maintaining a steady stream of 'exposures' of the dark dangers of 'Yugos' and their supposed secret societies, on the canefields of Queensland, and in particular labour-intensive industries around the major cities, from which they were a certainty to infiltrate the Labor rank and file.
DeleteBefore that, but also before my lived experience, suggested criminal activities of the Celestials provided similar copy to thrill the suburban reader on his train ride home, but it was difficult for even the most inventive writer to hint at Celestials every being able to infiltrate the Labor movement. Nor would they need to, given that it was claimed they could maintain their criminal secret societies with impunity.
In my callow youth I often read The Bulletin and sadly thought it a respectable journal. Fortunately times changed and so did I.
DeleteAs to eastern European 'terrorists' (Yugo and others)j, I seem to recall that there was some postulation that they were involved in the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing, but apparently that was the Ananda Marga ... maybe. Though there was the 'Croation Six', of course so there was some supposed 'Yugo' activity.
It does give one some sense of the enormous importance of Australia in world affairs to consider how very few 'foreign terrorist' attacks we have had.
While 'toon day is always welcome, particularly as Rupert seems not to see any benefit to his prints from having 'toonists of any talent, I have a lingering thought from the 'Tom Tomorrow' you gave us yesterday, Dorothy. My thought is that some persons are simply beyond the satire of even the more adept 'toonists. And I do mean Stephen Miller. Of recent time he has been appearing in odd 'YouTube' clips from, or linked to, Fox. Some of those go beyond scaring small children, and scare grown adults, because he tries to SMILE. A Stephen Miller smile is truly frightening. Out of a sense of responsibility, I will not offer a link, in case someone raises it without absorbing first that this will be something that can never be 'unseen'.
ReplyDeleteFor those who are prepared to take the risk, he is easy enough to find, but I leave it to you.
19 of the funniest JD Vance couch memes
ReplyDeleteThe people have spoken, and they want more JD Vance couch jokes.
https://www.dailydot.com/memes/vance-couch-meme/