In which the pond offers up the craven Craven as a way of ruining a good afternoon ...

 

The pond is now back at its southern base, with a realisation why conservatives (and others) in the deep south have been driven mad.

The state government has embarked on a campaign to turn the once noble, goldfields-funded Victorian city of Melbourne into Los Angeles, a haven for cars rather than people ...

There were assorted overpasses, a grotesque amount of concrete and tar (got to break the state budget in style) and gridlocked traffic - on the principle of more roads means more vehicles to clutter them .

Even worse, there was a feeble attempt to distract motorists with what in the pond's household is known as RMIT green, a baleful colour that resembles fluorescent vomit ... (the plastic green on RMIT's Swanston street bunker still threatens the pond's eyeballs each time the pond passes).

Throw in limp spaghetti shapes hardened into curly orange brown shapes, and the trip to Footscray was like a demented journey into hell.

Of course it's not just roads that drive conservatives mad. 

Religion has a big part to play. The pond was reminded of this by James Verini's long piece for The New Yorker, The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War, For decades, Alexander Dugin argued that Russia had a messianic mission, and that destroying an independent Ukraine was necessary to fulfilling it. (archive)

Verini began this way ...

In August, 2022, six months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, a cultural festival named Traditions was held outside Moscow, at the onetime summer retreat of Alexander Pushkin. The star speaker was Alexander Dugin, a scholar and a prominent proponent of the war who has been called the prophet of the new Russian Empire. In his book “Being and Empire” (2023), which runs to a Heideggerian length of seven hundred and eighty-four pages, Dugin characterizes Russia as nothing less than “the last place of the true subject of history in time and space.” His lecture at the festival, “Tradition and History,” was as sprawling as its title suggested. Sitting under a canopy, he extemporized on the seasonal labors of the Russian peasantry, finding in the pre-modern past the “secret center” of the nation’s spiritual life.
For Dugin, the greatest enemy of Russia is liberalism, which he has defined as the “false premise that a human is a separate, autonomous individual—a selfish animal seeking its own benefit. And nothing more.” He has written that “such a liberal person—completely detached from God, history, and society; from the people and culture; from the family and loved ones; from collective morality and ethnic identity—does not exist; and if they do exist, they ought not to.”
After the talk, some members of the audience gathered around Dugin. A young man asked, “This liberalism thing—is it possible that concealed within it is some link to the Lord that will take it and bring it down?”
“Perhaps,” Dugin told him. “That’s why there are people who fight against the liberal world, even within the liberal world.”
“Maybe there is simply a certain substance that has flooded everything, all the brains,” the young man went on. “Then a flame is lit inside it by its offspring, which instantly turns the game upside down?”
The crowd looked befuddled, but Dugin cottoned at once. “Ah,” he said. “That would be Donald Trump!”
Everyone laughed, including Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, who’d accompanied him to the event. A writer and broadcaster, Dugina also worked as a publicist and scheduler for her father. That evening, as they drove in different cars, an explosive attached to the underside of Dugina’s S.U.V. detonated. Her father got out of his vehicle as other drivers stopped. Someone taped the scene; Dugin can be seen stepping among the flaming wreckage, holding his hands to his head. The next day, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, sent Dugin a telegram calling Dugina’s death “a vile, cruel crime.”

Funny (peculiar) when Verini notes this aspect of Dugin's deep thinking ...

...Although other Russian intellectuals have called for Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Federation, none have done so for quite so long, or with such a murderous tone, as Dugin. “Russia can be either great or not at all,” he writes in his 2014 book “Ukraine: My War,” adding, “Of course, for greatness, people always, in all centuries, pay a very heavy price, sometimes shedding entire seas of blood.”

Moving along, the real point of this exercise was to do a pivot and offer up the thoughts of another deeply crazed conservative, this one a Catholic from the south, the craven Craven, who was out and about this morning in the lizard Oz, doing his best to create disharmony around harmony day ...

Why I think we would miss Harmony Day, The de-harmonisation of Harmony Day is the solemn proposal of the Australian Human Rights Commission, a body that exists to promote civil rights and pay its commissioners and staff healthy remuneration.

You get a sense of the bitter, calcified, ossified, rigid, resentful tone in that header ...

You also get a sense of it in the caption for the first photo, Our Human Right commissars puritanically intone that Harmony Day should be a miserable occasion of deep reflection and regret for the “systemic racism” that runs to this day through Australian society.

It's always the way, barking mad fundamentalists deploring others for 'puritanical intonations', as if their own puritanical intonings are somehow exempt ...

You get a sense of the serial pedant at work in the opening line...

The best jokes always work by combining utterly implausible elements. In other words, they work because they don’t work.

Really?

In the pond's world, when a joke doesn't work, it's because the joke doesn't work ... but on with the griping and the whining and the snowflake suffering ...

So when someone tells you there’s a proposal to rename Harmony Day – the day Australians celebrate the peaceful coexistence of our multi-ethnic communities – to the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Day, you really have to laugh. But then the giggles die in your throat once you realise some lunatic, somewhere, actually is serious.
The de-harmonisation of Harmony Day is the solemn proposal of the Australian Human Rights Commission, a body that exists to promote civil rights and pay its commissioners and staff healthy remuneration.
Just taking its proposal semantically for the moment, the commission wants the name of our vicious festival of friendliness to reflect the technical title of the document that is its vague ancestor.
This is the ponderously named – but for leftie lawyers perennially remunerative – United Nations Declaration for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Particularly for six-year-olds at the local primary school who are trying to enjoy the customs of other communities by wearing papier mâché hats and costumes put together from paper bags and sticky tape.

The pond isn't wrapped in the name, but it would be simple enough to stick with the original name, and add the verbiage as an explanation.

But excoriation is the name of the game here, because the craven Craven is more interested in defenestrating leftie lawyers than in calling out actual lunatics busy pissing on such concepts from a great height ... you know, another form of cultish religious devotion, just a bit more recent than the Catholic church cult (would you like a little transubstantiation and genuine cannibalism with that?) ...

Speaking of funny names, the pond has always been drawn to St. Lucifer's Church in Sardinia. There's a reason for the name:

St. Lucifer of Cagliari (Latin: Lucifer Calaritanus, Italian: Lucifero da Cagliari; died 20 May 370 or 371) was a bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia known for his passionate opposition to Arianism. He is venerated as a Saint in Sardinia. (Wiki)

Lucifer was always given a bum wrap.

Meanwhile, the reptiles were trying to be DEI, though every day on Sky Noise down under and in Murdoch rags you can hear and see some rabid right winger shouting at the clouds at the very notion, Students at Marsden Road Public School celebrate Harmony Day.

The craven Craven carried on with his snidery, and attempted some humour, always a fatal mistake when you're absolutely lacking either a funny bone or a sensa huma ...

There are real belly laughs imagining what the Commission for Silly Names might do with other popular celebrations.
Anzac Day would become The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Landing in the Dardanelles (Probably a War Crime) Day. Your birthday will become a Gender-Neutral Gestational Emergence Day (culturally impeccable, but very hard to fit to the tune of Happy Birthday, or spell out in icing sugar on a sponge cake).

Oh FFS ... this is The best jokes always work by combining utterly implausible elements. In other words, they work because they don’t work in action?

Nah, they don't work, because they're as funny as a pile of dog excrement sitting on the pavement in the hot noon day Tamworth sun.

Thank the long absent lord the craven Craven stopped trying ...

But things get a bit sinister when you understand the commission’s reasoning for turning Harmony Day into a jangle of politically correct jargon. The commission thinks Harmony Day is just too happy. No, really.
Our Human Right commissars puritanically intone that Harmony Day should be a miserable occasion of deep reflection and regret for the “systemic racism” that runs to this day through Australian society.

The implicit point is that there's no "systemic racism" in Australia, which might come as a surprise of the victims of the systemic racism that flourishes ...

That reminded the pond of the venerable Meade adding a little more to the systemic racism embodied in the Terror's grand plot ... Daily Telegraph takes action after ‘mind-blowingly stupid’ stunt … by tracking down leaker

The Daily Telegraph editor, Ben English, has never addressed the newsroom about an alleged attempt by News Corp staff to provoke workers at a Middle Eastern restaurant into making prejudicial comments.
The confrontation in the Newtown restaurant was described this week by Asio’s director general, Mike Burgess, as “mind-blowingly stupid” and “unhelpful” during a Senate estimates hearing.
But English has taken some action. News Corp tracked down the source of the leak to Crikey that the operation was known internally as “undercoverjew” by investigating its internal systems.
A spokesperson for the Daily Telegraph said: “Tonight The Daily Telegraph accepted the resignation of a staff member.”
A source said that newsroom staff were appalled by the incident and are now more upset there appeared to be zero consequences for anyone involved except the leaker.
Meanwhile, English is blissfully away from the scene of the discontent as one of a contingent of Daily Telegraph staffers enjoying themselves in Las Vegas for the 2025 NRL Telstra Premiership season.

You'd think there'd be a miserable occasion for deep reflection and regret for the systemic racism that runs to this day through the Murdoch rags and courses out into Australian society to corrupt and ruin, but the craven Craven doesn't care to talk about such matters ...

It will be a sort of secular Ash Wednesday, where we will anoint our foreheads with ash produced from burned copies of happy children’s books, while flagellating ourselves with ethically sourced whips.
Dissident children could be locked in a cupboard with a complete set of the commission’s voluminous, self-congratulatory reports. That will teach them, the rotten little incipient racists.

Oi vey, that's a bit too close to Opus Dei routines and the punishments dished out by Christian Brothers and nuns until they were reluctantly brought into line ... though the devotion to the cilice continues in some circles ...

Yours for just over a hundred bucks, while the pond recalls a nun offering the pond a dunce's hat and a chance to stand in the corner face to the wall for an hour for not knowing all the catechism. 

And the craven Craven has the nerve to blather about self-congratulation, when all the church offered was a life of pious misery as a way of avoiding an eternity in hell ...

The craven Craven then indulged his usual phobias, sounding worse as more nouns and verbs joined his parade... and just to prove what an original thinker he is, so did Orwell's take on 1984, for the umpteenth time in the lizard Oz ...

It gets worse. Much, much worse. It turns out that the specific campaign against Harmony Day, and happiness in general, is part of a master strategy. This is contained in the unnervingly named National Anti-Racism Framework: A Roadmap to Elimination of Racism in Australia, released by the commission in November. It is a title that could only have been dreamt up in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or possibly even by Joseph Stalin himself on a particularly sinister day.
Its thesis is that Australia is an intrinsically racist state. It persecutes just about everyone and everything. It should be deconstructed, now.
But we particularly persecute a few minorities officially approved by the commission. Go to its website and you will find the chief international, racist atrocities of the Australian people. Anti-Palestinian Racism, Anti-Arab Racism and Islamophobia. Shame on you, Australia. Boo. Hiss.
Admittedly, anti-Semitism gets a mention, but really only as a stage whisper. The commission’s focus is on the limited field of anti-Semitism at universities, which is like performing a major medical examination by probing a patient’s left foot.

At this point the reptiles decided to slip in a political snap, Russian Communist Party supporter holds a portrait of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a memorial ceremony. Picture: AFP

At last a chance to link back to the crazed Alexander Dugin who began this late arvo offering.

Still no word however from the craven Craven on why DEI is so offensive ...

On and on rambled the bloated, craven Craven with tendentious, divisive, ideological padding about ... you guessed it already ...

The commission also has an understandable focus on the difficult circumstances of Australia’s Indigenous people, but not in any way that’s remotely useful.
At heart, of course, the commission’s vast paper trail reveals little of principle. What it really does is show a lust for power that would make Napoleon feel a little self-involved.
The commission wants to conceive of Australia as a mere bucket of chromic human rights abuses.

Its narrative is pure postmodernist settler theory. The already bloated school curriculum should be stuffed further with tendentious, divisive, ideological padding. Apparently, racism is to be defeated by stirring interracial resentment. Not one life will be saved, not one school built.

Really? Perhaps best not to build more Catholic schools if they're going to be populated by kiddie fiddlers and bullies and sanctimonious, hectoring, lecturing priests ...

Sorry, the pond stands corrected.

Everything is well in the land, thanks to the Catholic church. No abuses of children or women here ...

There's always a deal of projection at work in the craven Craven, what with the Catholic church routinely refusing to acknowledge disasters or punish the wicked in its ranks, while consigning others to an eternity of hellfire, and that's why the sarcasm offered up by the craven Craven becomes a form of irritating trolling, simple-minded in its idle provocations ...

 Politics and policy will consist almost entirely of remedying these disasters and punishing the wicked. Like those dreadful families celebrating Harmony Day.
Of course, such a massive program of rectification will require noble leaders. Who will they be? Blushingly, the Human Rights Commission steps forward. In a society consisting of nothing but abused rights, only heroic rights practitioners can rule.
This really is the same program that supporters of a Bill of Rights have had on sale for the past half century, but which no one has been silly enough to buy. Just turn Australia into a thicket of rights enforced by right-minded judges and all our problems will be over.
The fatal flaw in that argument was handing over ultimate power from an elected parliament to unelected, undemocratic judges.
But the Human Rights Commission can solve all this. We do not have to vote on a Bill of Rights. We need not worry about parliament or judges. Armed with a bible of correctitude, the commission itself and its woke allies will take charge of the soul of the commonwealth.
I think we will miss Harmony Day.
Greg Craven is a former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

Better the HRC for all its flaws than a Catholic church populated with the likes of the craven Craven.

The pond wouldn't miss the craven Craven if his musings were to disappear tomorrow, never to return ...there's only so much blathering about bibles of correctitude by a rectitudinous prick with an unbearably smug keyboard that anyone should be forced to endure ...

Here have a last laugh courtesy the craven Craven ...