In which the craven Craven stamps a hallmark for seasonal stupidity ...

 

In keeping with the spirit of the season, Jonathan Kennedy produced a delightful troll in the Graudian, The birth of Jesus would probably have been forgotten – if it wasn’t for a plague.

The pond has heard the argument before, and while it's not provable, it is credible and plausible that a plague helped produce a plague of Xians. See how the cult grew:

...After the Jews in Palestine failed to convert en masse, Jesus’s followers turned their attention to Gentiles. They made some headway, but the vast majority of people across the empire continued praying to the Roman gods.
There were about 150,000 Christians scattered across the empire in AD200, according to Bart D Ehrman, author of The Triumph of Christianity. This works out to 0.25% of the population – similar to the proportion of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the UK today.
Then, towards the end of the third century, something remarkable happened. The number of Christian burials in Rome’s catacombs increased rapidly. So did the frequency of Christian first names in papyrus documents preserved by arid desert conditions in Egypt. Christianity was becoming a mass phenomenon. By AD300 there were approximately 3 million Christians in the Roman empire.

It was the Plague of Cyprian wot did it, with Xians seizing their chance:

...As Stark and Harper point out, the fact that so many Christians survived, and that Christians managed to save pagans abandoned by their families, provided the best recruitment material any religion could wish for: “miracles”.
Without these miracles, Romans would not have adopted Jesus’s message so enthusiastically, and Christianity would probably have remained an obscure sect. In this alternative reality, it’s likely we would still decorate our homes with evergreen plants to symbolise nature’s resilience and vitality at midwinter. The nativity story, however, would be lost in the dustbin of history.

It's a splendid troll, and well worth introducing over the seasonal dinner table if an Xian of the bromancer kind hovers into view. 

Begin by gently explaining that it took a plague to produce a plague of Xians, and after much thumping of the table, everybody can have an early night or retire to watch a bad Xmas movie.

One of the joys of a reduced reptile intake over the holyday season has been the chance to explore the field.

Take this story at Media Matters, exploring the wonders of the drone hysteria and the resulting unhinged conspiracy theories.

Just a few samples - see the original for links and many more tall tales:

• Following claims on social media from Saxon Aerospace CEO John Ferguson — and an X user who picked up the claim and earned millions of views — that the drones could be looking for a “gas leak” or “radioactive material,” right-wing pundits have taken that theory and used it to suggest that the radioactive material stems from a potential nuclear weapon known as a dirty bomb. 
• X user Jersey Futures picked up Ferguson’s theory and speculated that the drones were “american made HPGe nuclear detector drones,” earning 2.7 million views. Jersey Futures, who claimed to have “spent 1/3 of my career as an RF engineer,” speculated that the drones were “collecting information in how public will react (PsyOp) and testing their ability to sweep a port city like NY for dirty bombs.” [X, 12/13/24]
• Fox News guest and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves suggested that the drones are UFOs and are “beyond our state of the art.” Graves: “Well, for a number of years, people have been reporting what is known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, which are unattributed, unknown objects of unknown intent that seem to be exhibiting performance characteristics that are beyond our state of the art. … The whole behavior in general doesn't leave very much room for other options if it is not a foreign adversary.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 12/12/24]
• The National Desk’s Armstrong Williams suggested that the drones are an attempt by the “deep state” to cancel Trump’s inauguration. Williams claimed intelligence officials have told him that “the government is purposely creating confusion,” adding, “If you have all these drones out of nowhere, some of the drones, definitely from our government, other drones we have no idea where they're coming from. Can you imagine if this continues that there would be an attempt to cancel the inauguration?” [Sinclair Broadcast Group, The National Desk, 12/16/24]

The pond feels compelled to finally reveal the truth. 

The pond arranged for a series of drones to be launched over New Jersey with the help of an American operative and pond correspondent - name concealed for security concerns - as a way for the pond to boost its circulation in the States. 

Sadly, before the pond could even begin to boast about its role in the affair, a whole host of nutters emerged from the swamp to claim the drones as their own, and that was that.

The United States is as reliable a source as any that can be found outside Russian state media for genuinely weird folk, and this story on Mediaite, with many bonus inputs, was a ripper... Candace Owens Melts Down After The Babylon Bee Skewers Her: ‘They Never Make Jokes About Jews’.

Talk about everyone clambering on to the joke.

The pond is more of an Onion person if it has to search for follow ups to Mad magazine, but there's a lot to be said for the right eating its own, and the angle was a good one, Candace Owens Horrified To Learn Christmas Was Started By Birth Of A Jew. 

The pond thinks it can smuggle in some of the text in that we're still in the 12 days of Xmas until 5th January:

U.S. — Media personality Candace Owens was shocked and appalled today after discovering that Christmas originated because of the birth of a Jew.
"You've got to be kidding me," exclaimed a stunned Owens. "This whole thing -- the lights, the carols, people worshipping -- all this started because of a Jew being born? Ugh. Our entire national calendar revolves around this holiday, and no one talks about that it's all because of a Jew. And we're still pretending like they don't control everything?"
The horrified Owens began tearing down all of her Christmas decorations and throwing them out to the curb, disgusted that she had been tricked by a Jewish plot. Lighting her nativity scene on fire, Owens resolved to expose the villainous Christmas plot to her listeners.
"Real Christians do not celebrate Christmas," said Owens the next morning as she began taping. "The fact is, if you're celebrating Christmas, you've been duped. You're just a pawn, cheering the birth of a Jew, just like they want you to. And when I say 'they', I think you know who I mean: the Jews."
At publishing time, Owens had once again gasped in dismay after learning that Easter celebrated the coming back to life of a Jewish guy.

The subsequent fun took the pond back to the grand days of Megyn Kelly, 'Santa just is white ... Jesus was a white man too', says Fox News presenter.

The Graudian still had the clip up here with a cautionary note ...

Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly insists that not only Jesus Christ but also Santa Claus were white during a debate on her television programme The Kelly File. Jesus Christ was born more than 2,000 years ago in the Middle East, making it unlikely that he was white.

Cue a plethora of stories that came out from 2001 on, with forensic anthropologist Richard Neave trying to evoke what a typical Jewish man of the period might have looked like, offering this set of mug shots:

It's a long way from Jeffrey Hunter and that blonde hair and piercing blue eyes look. 

The Beeb brooded about this at some length on Xmas eve in 2015, What did Jesus really look like?

The Beeb offered an alternative image

...For all that may be done with modelling on ancient bones, I think the closest correspondence to what Jesus really looked like is found in the depiction of Moses on the walls of the 3rd Century synagogue of Dura-Europos, since it shows how a Jewish sage was imagined in the Graeco-Roman world. Moses is imagined in undyed clothing, and in fact his one mantle is a tallith, since in the Dura image of Moses parting the Red Sea one can see tassels (tzitzith) at the corners. At any rate, this image is far more correct as a basis for imagining the historical Jesus than the adaptations of the Byzantine Jesus that have become standard: he's short-haired and with a slight beard, and he's wearing a short tunic, with short sleeves, and a himation.

Still a long way from Hunter's gorgeously long locks and those eyes...

...or from the AfD's imagining of your typical Germanic family, full of German blut ...

The pond must have missed out on that portion of the family's German genes and all that was left was an unseemly addiction to peppermints, potatoes, sausages and gingerbread. On the other hand, the original Nazis were inclined to look like a pug ugly bunch of ne'er do wells ... as far removed from the Aryan ideal as Adolf was from a good looking moustache ...

Sorry where where we? Oh that's right, the pond's quest for this day's reptile winner of the lizard Oz hunger games.

Talk about being deep into the silly season ...

There could only be one winner from this line up and the judges' decision was clear cut and final:

Sorry Jack the Insider, Vlad the sociopath's Xmas effort reduced the pond's taste for fat jokes; sorry healthy diet Bran, the silly season isn't the right time to read the reptiles in economic basket case campaign mode; sorry Gedaliah the pond has had its fill of talk of the genocidal and territorially expansionist current government of Israel.

There could only be one winner, the craven Craven, a truly insufferable scribbler, in top silly season form. 

Where the likes of the bromancer might be genuinely and lovably deeply weird, the craven Craven wants to be offensive in as many ways as he can manage, and, tip the lid, doff the hat to the pompous, portentous former ACU academic, he succeeds in A pox on the porpentines and pesky popinjays, This is journalism’s off-season. Our audience is drunk, hating the kids, or hiding from foaming Uncle Peter. Like the Antichrist, my dark hour has come, and I am filled with malice. My target is the entire, simpering modern English language.

Oh sheesh, the reptiles timed it as five minutes of unendurable suffering, and the suffering began with the opening snap ... Closeup of a family Christmas dinner.

It's one of those crap stock images, a sort of sub-Norman Rockwell variant with fragrant echoes of the AfD, that turns up in all sorts of odd places, used for odd purposes. Here are two of many ...

Now the reptiles have added to the list, just what you'd expect of a graphics department running on stock images empty.

But then, to be fair, a crap image entirely suits a crappy scribbler, doling out holyday season crap ...

This is journalism’s off-season. Our audience is drunk, hating the kids, or hiding from foaming Uncle Peter. Editors and subs are no ­better. Like the Antichrist, my dark hour has come, and I am filled with malice.
My target is the entire, simpering modern English language. I’ve bitterly accepted “impactful”, “holistic” and the metronomic “best practice”. I’ve chokingly swallowed “low-hanging fruit”, “drill down” and “evidence-based”. But I’ve had enough.
English, you’re an indiscriminate postmodern word-whore and you can stand on someone else’s corner. Like some low-rate literary exile, weeping beside the waters of the Paramatta River, I mourn for the English of Donne, Milton and Eliot. For that matter, I pine for the English of Enid Blyton.
I accept that writing – now the realm of motherless political speech hacks and unimaginative sign writers – has been on the wane for an age. Most of the really good words have been dropped from the team, like rugby forwards who failed the etiquette class. What happened to quality insults like Shakespeare’s popinjay and fearful porpentine? Popinjay was a person so obsessed with their spangly appearance they gave parrots a bad name. A fearful porpentine was not a prickly behemoth inspiring fear, but a spindly porcupine raising soft, futile spikes at every danger.

Yep, a hack image to set off a hack yearning for this sort of scribbling. Come on down Enid, so the craven Craven can pine ...

...Dick arrived the next day. He came in the carrier’s cart, with a small bag of clothes. He jumped down and hugged the children’s mother.
“Hallo, Aunt Polly!” he said. “It’s good of you to have me. Hallo, Jo! I say, aren’t Bessie
and Fanny big now? It’s lovely to be with you all again.” The children took him up to his
room. The girls unpacked his bag and put his things neatly away in the cupboard and the chest. They showed him the bed he was to sleep on.
“I expect I shall find it rather dull here after living in London,” said Dick, putting his hairbrushes on the little dressing-table. “It seems so quiet. I shall miss the noise of buses and trams.”
“You won’t find it dull!” said Jo. “My word, Dick, we’ve had more adventures since we’ve been here than ever we had when we lived in a big town.”
“What sort of adventures?” asked Dick in surprise. “It seems such a quiet place that I shouldn’t have thought there was even a small adventure to be found!”
The children took Dick to the window. “Look, Dick,” said Jo. “Do you see that thick, dark wood over there, backing on to the lane at the bottom of our garden?”
“Yes,” said Dick. “It seems quite ordinary to me, except that the leaves of the trees seem a darker green than usual.”
“Well, listen, Dick—that’s the Enchanted Wood!” said Bessie.
Dick’s eyes opened wide. He stared at the wood. “You’re making fun of me!” he said at last.
“No, we’re not,” said Fanny. “We mean what we say. Its name is the Enchanted Wood — and it is enchanted. And oh, Jo, in the middle of it is the most wonderful tree in the world!”
“What sort of tree?” asked Dick, feeling quite excited.
“It’s a simply enormous tree,” said Jo. “Its top goes right up to the clouds — and oh, Dick, at the top of it is always some strange land. You can go there by climbing up the top branch of the Faraway Tree, going up a little ladder through a hole in the big cloud that always lies on the top of the tree—and there you are in some peculiar Land!”
“I don’t think I believe you,” said Dick. “You are making it all up.”
“Dick! We’ll take you there and show you what we mean,” said Bessie. “It’s all quite true. Oh, Dick, we’ve had such exciting adventures at the top of the Faraway Tree. We’ve been to the Rocking-Land, and the Birthday Land.”
“And the Land of Take-What-You-Want and the Land of the Snowman,” said Fanny. “You just can’t think how exciting it all is.”
“And, Dick, all kinds of queer folk live in the trunk of the Faraway Tree,” said Jo. “We’ve lots of good friends there. We’ll take you to them one day..."

Oh hallo Dick, there's so many dickheads to see in the Land of the Reptiles ... 

You can't begin to imagine how exciting it is to visit them ... 

Why here's one now, lovely Rita meter maid in an AV distraction from the craven Craven ...

Sky News host Rita Panahi says the Australian government has fallen for “warped” gender ideologies in its latest stunt in trying to seem woke through the Department of Health. Ms Panahi has accused the government of waging a “war against women” after it published on its website that it invites women and “people with a cervix” to get a screening. “The war against women and language continues, and the latest promoter of this warped ideology is the Australian government,” she said. “Department of Health and Aged Care has produced this hot mess – it’s a National Cervical Screening Program, the key word there being cervical. “Well, it refers to women and ‘people with a cervix’.”

Ah, the never-ending war on trans folk, and it's quite the miracle that the pond's TG friends manage to take all the bile and the hate in their stride ... 

And now on with the craven Craven's bile, showing the exemplary sensitivity of an Xian in his seasonal prime:

With his sale-price Zegna suits and Armani front teeth, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is a popinjay. Scuttling heroically away from any possible policy debate, Anthony Albanese channels his inner fearful porpentine.
Today, we have a language primarily designed to cover and conceal, not explain, let alone entertain. We are the undertakers of our own mother tongue.
Which brings me, like some pocket-exploding Hezbollah general, to the central matter of death. It used to be a bucket of linguistic opportunity. Not only did we die, but carked it, kicked the bucket, snuffed it or took the one-way tram. But whichever way you said it, we were stone cold dead.
Today, nobody dies. We euphemistically “pass”. But within this insipid language of journey, to where exactly do we pass? As an (occasionally) good Catholic I certainly will go to Heaven where a Carlton captained by Jesus wins every premiership. But what about you, the roughly average, non-practising agnostic, religiously ­obtuse Australian?
Given current funerary practices, you will indeed be passed, as a momentary blast of crematorium flatulence. But as they ease you into the oven, you had better hope you are definitively, Oxford dictionary, just plain dead.
It’s the same with that other unavoidable rite of passage: birth. For decades we have not been indecorously pregnant but joyously “expecting”. Expecting what, exactly? The sludge of expectation suggests the serene production of a designer baby, girls with the looks of an infant Margot Robbie, boys with the future sporting prowess of Stephen Smith, but without the ­interest in ball improvement.

Indeed, indeed, when confronted by some sobbing soul, weeping over their lost one, perhaps someone who unwisely ingested too much Xmas pud or salmon mousse, remember to speak to them frankly ... remember to remind them that their loved one is as dead as a doornail, they've carked it. 

Use this sort of language to express your deepest sympathy and explain how they've curled up their toes ...

Mr. Praline: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This reptile is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-REPTILE!!

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of a smirking Jimbo, always a trigger for reptile snowflakes...

Sure enough the craven Craven was triggered ...

But no one tells you in hard grammatical English what actually will happen: labour pains, medical bill pains, and the ultimately painful possibility that your baby will have the face of Peter Dutton and the body of Barnaby Joyce. It’s like the current saccharine announcement by husband and wife that “We’re pregnant!”. No, you’re not, mate, unless there’s something terribly wrong with your plumbing.
Of course, the language of husband and wife is just too descriptive for our modern age. Now we all have an undifferentiated “partner”. The next person to call my wife of 45 years my partner will get a tongue lashing that scrapes the flesh from their ribs.
Naturally, un-plain English infests the business sector, where every linguistic fad is a divine command. We now talk seriously about corporate “culture”, as if every grubby platform for fiscal gain has the same human sophistication as an actual civilisation. Remind me, what precisely is the artistic tradition of Rio Tinto?
Companies used to have a personnel department. Now we have something ostentatiously called human relations. I thought human relations meant sex. Does every firm really have a branch that plots the improbable liaisons of its employees? It might explain Christmas drinks, I suppose.
But recently, the corporate cluster and its public sector clones have surpassed themselves in manufacturing new, meaningless strings of words that can substitute for actual language. We must all “lean into” a challenge. We must “call out” bad behaviour. We must give a “big shout out” to people we don’t actually know, but who might be suffering stoically somewhere on the official spectrum of public worthiness.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap of Tamworth's shame, the man responsible for its fall from grace as the centre of the known universe ... Barnaby Joyce... gesticulating in a way only Barners can do ...

Of course all this blather about language is as old as the hills, it's just the cheapest sort of stocking filler ... the sort you can get from 2022 and Warwick McFadyen offering The death sentence: bureaucratic goggledygook is killing our language (Nine rag paywall).

Don Watson made quite the career out of writing about and talking about the decay of language... the pond has a few of his efforts littering the house.

In short, the craven Craven is just offering up borrowed, stale goods ...

What happened to the good old sending “thoughts and prayers”? I know people said it was unsuitable for publicly atheist politicians. But personally, I thought it only right that some proudly godless minister of the Crown should underline their empathy through a clearly stated, humiliating, cringingly implausible public lie.

Trust the craven Craven, it had bugger all to do with publicly atheist politicians.

The reason that it fell out of favour, especially in the United States, was because of of a perception of malign impotence, by allegedly Xian politicians showing sublime indifference.

It's why sensible folk don't offer thoughts and prayers for Ukrainians or for the Gaza genocide ... that's just adding insult to the killing fields.

This variant on the insufferable Xian kept on sending his thoughts, and the pond wished that prayer had some residual power ...

Sport used to be the last refuge of plain English. After all, how much can you obfuscate the details of a game like AFL, which is calculated in kicks, marks and collisions, finally resulting in an unequivocal numeric score.
True, we’ve always had our cliches. “Bad kicking is bad football”. Mindlessly true. “He brought his winning game”. What, in a box? “We’re taking it game by game”. How else can you take it? But at least these nostrums were clear, concise and bleedingly obvious.
Now, courtesy of our sportscasters’ delight with all things American, we have obscure concepts like “upper body strength”. You mean he has broad shoulders? What is “drawing deep on psychological resources”? Presumably, a guarantee no one will weep or lose bladder control if they miss a mark. Apparently, we now have “contested possessions” instead of two players going for the ball. Why use English when you can go with Yankee ­obscurantism?
Mind you, I have always liked the impenetrable concept of a “hard ball get”. It reminds me of those anatomical tactics we were taught when playing front row in a game of rugby union, but were never allowed to admit.
Naturally, the three great preoccupations of our time – gender, race and climate – have done their very best to mangle phrases and concepts beyond the mundane ­requirements of expression and comprehension.
We are all alphabetically aware of the term LGBTQI and know and respect whoever the hell falls within that acronym. But what about when it’s followed by a confronting plus sign? Who are these undisclosed pluses lurking among us? Or does it cover everyone by a sort of gender conscription? Can you be a conscientious objector?

Or perhaps a conscientious dickhead? At this point the reptiles hastily arranged another visual interruption, Climate change protesters seen along Princes Bridge, Melbourne.

That would trigger the craven Craven snowflake, but first back to the insufferable:

A newish development is the emergence of the “pansexual”, who is all of the above in every possible contortion. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

Newish? The pond had taken a lot in silence, bitten the tongue endlessly, but enough was enough. 

This was a typically craven flourish of Craven ignorance, and it will make some people rush off to read that the idea of pansexuality has been around a very long time, and was given a more formal dressing and nomenclature some time ago ...

Early individuals who displayed pansexual tendencies include John Wilmot and Friedrich Schiller. Although later attributed to Shulamith Firestone, the hybrid words "pansexual" and "pansexualism" were first attested in 1914 (spelled "pan-sexualism"), coined by opponents of Sigmund Freud  to denote the idea "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical". The term was translated to German as Pansexualismus in Freud's work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. (wiki)

Here, have an ambivalent Beardsley ...

Ignorance and bigotry are pretty much the hallmarks of any Craven outburst and he had other fish to fry in his bigoted way

The language of race theory is the sort of obscurantist quagmire favoured by frogs with degrees in critical communications. The slightest misstep brings social and political ruin. Worst of all, across well-meaning but accident-prone countries like the US, Canada and Australia, the terminology seems to change monthly. Across a lifetime in these gently woke nations, the same person can move through being black, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Afro-American, First Nations, or a person of colour.
Not to be outdone, the climate debate over the past 30 years has morphed with the ease of a moulting caterpillar through problematic descriptors and contestable diagnoses. We began with global cooling and switched to global warming. Then we went to climate change, followed by a climate ­crisis, to a climate emergency, to a climate catastrophe.
The only way forward is an ­Atmospheric Armageddon.

The Nine rags have been running some classic Wilcox, and that reminded the pond that the craven Craven was likely the unholy result of an unholy union ...

And so at last to a couple of short final pars ...

This is the sort of meaning-mangling that frightens dictionaries and gives cheap washing machines a bad name. With the obvious exception of an incin­erated Christmas dinner, surely something cannot go from warming to catastrophe in the blink of an emotional eye.
Still, it’s all too late for the language. Self-regarding race theorists from Ivy League universities may well be popinjays. The more apoplectic climate catastrophists probably are fearful porpentines. But who would now understand these marvellous put-downs?

Fair enough, the craven Craven set out to prove what an insufferable dickhead he is, and he succeeds in his usual way with cheap shots as a form of climate science denialism.

Yep, what a winner, the pond couldn't have wished for a more exceptional serve of seasonal fuckwittery than that offered up this day ...

And so to end with a troll ...