In which there's much Caterist nuking, and a craven Craven, and that wily old bird, the Major Mitchell ...

 

The pond's partner insisted that the pond take note of the Nine papers' very own General Ripper, even sending a link and a screen cap, with the note "The stupid, it burns."

Under protest, the pond did at least promise to observe the latest addition to the canon of stopping the worrying and loving the beermb ...

And so endlessly on.

The pond will grant that this was a fine variant on nuking the country to save the planet, what with the new strategy apparently to nuke the world to save the country, but it did occur to the pond that if we planned it right and became the nuclear mouse that roared, we could perhaps take out thirty million or so Chinese, that would leave a billion or so pretty pissed, and the rest of the planet not particularly happy.

The pond drew a line in the sand about providing a link. Anyone wanting General Ripper's company should be able to find it easily enough ...

The pond had its own weekend reading to celebrate, with the pond's recent inclination to break Godwin's Law vindicated when reading John Naughton's column in The Observer aka Graudian, Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are dicing with the death of democracy.

As it's up there free for all, there's only a need for a teaser. 

After noting a couple of matters that bring the 1930s to mind, Naughton went on:

...In 1932, the Nazi party was in deep financial trouble and when Hitler became Chancellor the following year he made a personal appeal to business leaders for help. The money rolled in from 17 different business groups, with the largest donations coming from IG Farben and Deutsche Bank. At the time, those donations must have looked like shrewd bets for the industrialists who placed them. But, as the historian Adam Tooze put it in his landmark book on the period, it also meant that German industrialists were “willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany”. In return for their donations, Tooze wrote, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level. Corporate profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment. Fascism turned out to be good for business – until it wasn’t.
One wonders if any of these thoughts went through what might loosely be called the minds of the tech titans savouring their $300,000 dinners on a June evening in San Francisco. My guess is not. The denizens of Silicon Valley, you see, really don’t do history, because they’re in the business of creating the future. Accordingly, they have nothing to learn from the past.
Which is a pity, because history has some lessons for them. Those German industrialists who decided in 1933 that they had to back Hitler might not have had a clear idea of what he had in store for Germany and possibly knew nothing of his plans for the “final solution”. David Sacks’s dinner guests, though, have no such excuse: Project 2025, the plans for Trump’s second term, are out in the open in a 900-page document on the web.

And so on, and even better Naughton provided provided a link to a piece by Timothy Snyder in his Substack, with Synder having a go at the bane of the pond's life, especially when reading the NY Times ... Both Sides

Again only a teaser is needed, with Synder offering a quite liturgical take.

...Both-Sidesism is another dualism.  When confronting a phenomenon, for example an election or a party convention, the acolytes of Both Sides perform two steps.  They reduce events to two personalities, then treat them as equal aspects of the two-headed divinity known as Both Sides. 
Again: that there only two sides, and that the two aspects are the same, are unspoken articles of faith.
Once this initial ritual has been performed, the task of the priesthood is to sense disturbances that disrupt the apparent equality of the two aspects of Both Sides. The mythic utterances of the priests of Both Sides – bad journalism -- resolve the cultic tension that appears when a difference between the two aspects emerges. 
Equality is restored in a peculiar way, one that emphasizes the sacred character of the dual god, at the expense of understanding reality.  The priests cannot undo the deeds of one aspect of Both Sides – for example a coup attempt or a call to deport millions.  And if they described it accurately, they would only be deepening the mystical inequality between Both Sides’ two aspects.  They must normalize.
Our Both-Sides priests correct the mystical imbalance with two mantric maneuvers.  The first is to proclaim, groundlessly, that the perpetrator of the crime has learned his lesson, executed a pivot, turned a corner.  The second is to humiliate the other side, the one that did nothing.  And thus the mystical equilibrium between the two aspects of Both Sides is restored. 
This normalization has consequences.  If one of the two aspects of Both Sides seems to have done a great evil, the priests of Both Sides always ritually vituperate the other side.  The price of the restoration of mystical equality is the rehabilitation of the criminal and the degradation of the blameless.

Synder exempts actual investigative journalists from his ravaging, but he should also have exempted those wretched purveyors of lies that don't even attempt both siderism ...w

Witness the reptiles of the lizard of Oz, where there is only one side, a fanatical kind of monotheism that brooks no alternative.

As usual, the pond scanned this day's headlines for examples ...

Bingo. It was cackling Claire that jumped in boots and all on the shameless treatment of the female (the pond uses the word advisedly) Algerian boxer, and judging by her pitch in the lizard Oz, putting herself in the transphobic camp alongside Vlad the Sociopath, the Hungarians and the likes of the despicable Rowling.

Luckily the pond could avoid all that by turning to old school favourite the Caterist, also wanting to nuke the planet ... and offering up the usual ironies for those with a memory longer than a gnat ...

Yes, the flood waters in quarries whisperer and climate science denialist (and, speaking of Hungarians, a lover of despots of the Orbán kind,always generous with handouts to indigent scribblers) was back on the nuclear bandwagon, with a fine array of snaps and a video to help ...

The Caterist was outraged at the refusal to tear up the country ...

This is where the reptile irony machine kicks in to high gear.

Note the opening lines of the next gobbet:

Please allow the pond to repeat the Caterist line: "Digging it out of the ground and selling it on the international market is the most effective contribution Australia could make to the global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and advance prosperity."

Say what? Why should we be worried about reducing emissions, save perhaps those of the Caterist?

Here was the Caterist scribbling Unsettled science for the Speccie mob back in 2015 (caution, you'll be rewarding the Speccie mob with a click) ... with the pond just picking up a bit of the undiluted scepticism ...

What need for the global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?

All's well in the world, there is ice in the winter, and the growth in spring is just around the corner, and we can leave the the uranium in the ground and save the country from despoliation, an important consideration for the flood waters in quarries whisperer, because his latest climate science denialist riff has been ranting about the way that renewables of the solar panel and wind turbine kind simply ruin the landscape and the bush and all those sweet bush creatures ...

And with the irony overload fully compleat, a final gobbet of ripping it all up and shipping it out (no, if you ship the Caterist to Hungary, likely it will only be temporary) ...

In its search for its irony fix, the pond came across this indignant squawk by the Caterist in response to Quarterly Essay 43 ...

That was back when he was earning a dishonest living as the editor of the Weekend Australian, rather than his recent fawning and simpering over despots.

Climate science copped a mention ...

Naturally this was before the Caterist's own heroic contributions to denialism in the lizard Oz, roughly one in every one piece he's scribbled, not to mention his Speccie mob moonlighting.

Here, have a cartoon to celebrate ...

Bad news was to follow. It seems that the craven Craven has decided to set up a Monday perch, a new home after the ACU turfed him out (or they agreed to part ways, whatever)...

His topic was populism, a subject he managed to discuss without once mentioning the deeds of that supreme populist, the chairman emeritus, or any of his tabloids, or the contribution that Faux Noise has made to the United States in pursuit of the futile attempt to satiate unmitigated greed ...

In that sense, it's a singular achievement, of the kind only a craven Craven could manage ...

The reptiles provided the craven Craven with a satisfyingly eclectic set of huge stills, all handily in the public domain, and thereby saving the remnants of the graphics department's budget ...

The craven Craven seems to think that the mango Mussolini has become a populist without mentioning the channel that supported, indulged and craved his populism ...such that he turned to it for help in his desperate hour of need with a desperate plea ...

You won't find any of that in the craven Craven ...

Always with the history lessons, the first refuge of lizard Oz scoundrels of the hole in the bucket man kind ...

It's possibly true that Hanson herself never dominated Australian politics, and was something of a distraction.

But what need of her, when the lying rodent took over all her policies and proclaimed to the world that we will defend our borders and we will decide who comes to this country?

Could the orange Jesus or Pauline herself put it any better? Could they outshine that master of populism, stealing from wannabe populists?

The reality is that we must assert and maintain the undoubted right we have as a sovereign nation to control our borders. It is the first element in a basic national security policy not only to have adequate defences for the country but also to have the right to decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

So it goes, a virulent form of populism celebrated by the Murdochian tabloids around the land ever since, and still a staple diet for aspirational populist the mutton Dutton, but never mind, we've reached the final line about a donkey, by a donkey, for donkeys ...

A fair go? You can find any number of mugs peddling this sort of crap, and yet ...

That talk of a fair go gave the pond its one dinkum horse laugh for the day ... have a cartoon to celebrate magical transformations ...

And now as the Major has already been mentioned in despatches, the pond will indulge the Major, though it takes the pond way over length ...

The pond hasn't given much thought to education since the grand days of dashing Donners in the lizard Oz, always ready to suggest a Catholic education as the way forward, but the pond promises that there will be an irony at the end ... though it's a hard slog to get through the Major congratulating himself and his fellow reptiles in an orgy of self-esteem...

The pond hates to tell the Major, but all that rote memorisation of French produced in the pond was a few stock phrases, of absolutely no utility (and even more so Latin, though the pond can still remember that Caesar sent Servius Galba with the Twelfth Legion into the territory of the Nantuates).

If you want to learn a language, forget memorisation, mingle with tolerant native speakers ...

Why is it that the reptiles somehow manage to think that the world should stay stuck in the 1950s with "this column"? 

Must everything be refracted through the Major's desperate search to find that long missing Order of Lenin medal?

At this point the reptiles interrupted the Major with the one still he was allowed ...

Then it was back to the Major ranting and more quoting of himself in the guise of "this column showed ...", which is to say how money for privileged private schools was a jolly good thing, you know, the "fair go" school of lizard oz journalism ...

The pond realised at this point that the pond had promised a Major Mitchell irony - no, it's not the usual blather about culture warriors from a culture warrior - and it eventually came, though in the last line...

Finland and Singapore? 

The pond can understand Singapore, it being the sort of soft authoritarian one party state that the Major would love wholeheartedly, but Finland? 

Surely not, surely the pond must remind the Major of just how devious and deviant those Fins are, with their socialist, neigh, almost leftie ways ...

Per the start of Matt Bruenig's piece in Jacobin, No, Finland Is Not a "Capitalist Paradise" ...

And that's more than enough herpetology studies for the day. Go socialism and socialists, the Major has your Finnish back ...

The pond will close by doing a catch-up with the infallible Pope  (incidentally a reminder of just how dull David Speers has managed to make The Insiders), and the immortal Rowe ...