For PhD herpetology students only: advanced courses in dog bothering and Dame Slapping ...

 

The pond had to think at least for a nanosecond about running an advanced course in reptile studies in a late arvo Sunday slot.

It's terribly easy to toss in the books,  and seek out diversions and distractions.

And yet the archive is fragile, and surely the dog botherer and Dame Slap deserve a place in the pond sun, even if the slot feels more like the sun in an Arctic winter, with students resembling a glazed Al Pacino.

Besides, the dog botherer was mentioned in despatches last Friday by the venerable Meade...

‘Rough justice’
The Australian’s columnist Chris Kenny could not resist elevating serial troublemaker Avi Yemini when the rightwing provocateur harassed the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran last week. In a Rebel News video, embedded in Kenny’s online story, Yemini is seen chasing Doran through Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, interfering with his attempt to file his report for ABC TV news.
Kenny claimed Yemini was justified in imposing “rough justice” on Doran and making “a salient point in a dramatic way at a telling time and place”.
We asked The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Michelle Gunn, why The Australian would platform Yemini’s antics when he has criminal convictions from 2019 for unlawful assault, using a carriage service to harass his former wife and breaching an intervention order in relation to another person.
It’s not the first time News Corp has featured Yemini, who has been banned several times by Facebook and was denied entry to New Zealand due to his criminal convictions.
Sky News Australia’s Andrew Bolt had Yemini on when he was banned by New Zealand, congratulating him for “having the courage to stand up to the mob”.
The Australian did not respond to a request for comment.
Kenny later accused the ABC news director, Justin Stevens, of “bullying” him after Stevens sent a letter of complaint about Kenny’s report to Gunn, News Corp’s executive chair, Michael Miller, and the chief executive of Sky News, Paul Whittaker.
Stevens said in the letter for Kenny to “publicly support seeing a dedicated, ethical journalist such as Matthew Doran being persistently harassed and abused in this way, and for News Corporation to embed the video in its content to amplify it to a wider audience and promote its content, is a low point”.
On Sky News Kenny accused Stevens of “trying to shut down criticism” and “silence critics” by sending the letter. “While [Stevens] might want to try to bully ABC critics and undermine them with their employers, I am happy to tell you that my employers stand by me, because they value your right to hear the facts, and to join informed debates based on those facts.”

Juicy and contemptible all in one, and a fitting introduction to the dog bothering ...

The header: The self-harm of a great nation, Nothing can kill a self-made country quite like complacency, forgetting our values, and favouring ideology over practicality. Our leaders are making bad decisions, effectively doing what a malevolent rival would do to weaken us.

The caption for the image, which provoked in the pond an unhealthy urge to indulge in a bit of flag burning, An Australian flag burns at a Melbourne protest, a stark symbol of the self-inflicted wounds dangerously undermining our nation from within. Picture: Reuters

The pond has never been fond of flags, ever since they made innocents trot out to salute the flag at Tamworth Primary ... and the flag fixation in the United States is truly bizarre, with flag waving even more common than gun ownership...a truly shocking notion, with faux stats suggesting some 51% own flags while only 32% personally own a gun, which verges on being unAmerican in the shoot-em-up sense.

Nobody seems to have done a flag count for Australia, while apparently only 1 in 30 have a gun license, but they do account for a hefty 4m+ registered firearms.

Enough of all that, the real point is that this is the dog botherer in litany mode, whining and wailing and railing, as only dog botherers can do, and pretty much anything and everything can set him off, from a little flag burning to furriners looking and sounding kinda funny.

There's nothing to do except contemplate the carry on ...

Tectonic forces are testing global stability. Bloody wars have erupted in the volatile flashpoints of the Middle East and eastern Europe, and both involve members of the worrying new unofficial, anti-West coalition of Iran, China, Russia and North Korea.
China is expansionist – militarily, economically and diplomatically – and it bullies and punishes countries that displease it. Governments and economies the world over, including our own, are burdened by alarming levels of debt as they deal with the inflation it fuels.
The world is only just starting to grapple with the epoch-shifting onslaught of artificial intelligence. Donald Trump’s America First tariff agenda has up-ended the established global trading order; aimed mainly at delivering fairer trade with China, it has triggered a response that weaponised China’s near monopoly on rare earths and critical minerals.
The Taiwan Strait remains a flashpoint. We’ve been reminded again this week that military vessels and aircraft, including Australia’s, are routinely intimidated by the Chinese military.
Yet back in February when a Chinese navy flotilla circumnavigated Australia and conducted live-firing exercises without appropriate warnings, our Prime Minister did not admonish Beijing; rather, he made excuses for China. Then, after years of Beijing’s economic sanctions and fiery rhetoric targeting Australia, Anthony Albanese spent six days in China being duchessed by Xi Jinping.

Surely the tariffs have been a jolly good thing? News Corp, or at least the Faux Noise component, loves them ...

Sorry,  must keep the 'toons under control, but the reptiles insist on loading up with useless images ...

Sailors on-board the Royal Australian Navy ship HMAS Arunta look at Chinese warships in the Tasman Sea, on February 13, 2025. Picture: AFP PHOTO / AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE; Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping in China in July. For most of this year Albanese has been Beijing’s ‘handsome boy’. Picture: PMO

The pond understands why. There's only so much whining that can be listened to before the desire to do a Noem on the dog takes hold. Is there an Ice Barbie with a 9mm in the house? 

By contrast Albanese waited all year to get his first face-to-face meeting with the US President this week, which thankfully went well, even if Labor’s long history of anti-Trump rhetoric soured the day to some degree, via former prime minister and current ambassador Kevin Rudd, a mate of Albanese’s who never should have been appointed.
Albanese has ground to make up with the US because his government previously rejected a US military request to help secure shipping in the Red Sea, dismissed calls for greater defence spending as part of the alliance relationship, and broke ranks diplomatically by voting against the US and Israeli position at the UN and recognising the non-existent state of Palestine.

What makes it even more problematic is the complete banality of the visual distractions, Donald Trump shakes the hand of Anthony Albanese after signing an agreement on critical minerals and rare earths in the Cabinet Room of the White House, on October 20, 2025, in Washington. Picture: AP

On and on he whined like the neighbour's dog ...

For most of this year Albanese has been Beijing’s “handsome boy” and a persona non grata in Washington, a terrible place for an Australian prime minister to be. Thankfully the US relationship is closer to being normalised after this week’s visit.
And while Trump remains in the White House, perhaps bad actors will be constrained. It is more than mere bluster from Trump that if he had remained in power Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
Likewise, Iran might not have activated Hamas for October 7. And especially after Trump took out Iran’s nuclear program with that high-precision, stealth bomber mission, China will be cautious over Taiwan.
If Joe Biden’s approach was illustrated by the shambolic evacuation of Kabul – an epic and pitiful display of America in retreat – then Trump’s decisiveness was illustrated by that masterful attack on Iran. Still, that clear leadership contrasts with what is missing here, where Albanese has been far too phlegmatic about disturbing events.

Um, it was King Donald that set in motion the Taliban sell-out, and good luck with the rest of his governing, which makes the Taliban look blissfully innocent in their attempts to shake down Afghanistan ...

How the reptiles love extrajudicial killings, aka murders and unilateral strikes on anyone and anything who offends the king,  US President Donald Trump in the Situation Room of the White House after the US military carried out a ‘very successful attack’ on three Iranian nuclear sites. Picture: AFP PHOTO / WHITE HOUSE

The dog botherer carried on with the usual litany of complaint, apparently unaware of the way that he in particular and News Corp in general spend each day encouraging hatred, and spouting division, fear and loathing ...

When Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun spoke to a crowd on a street corner at Sydney’s Lakemba on October 8, 2023, rejoicing at the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas the day before, celebrating it as a day of elation, victory, courage and pride, I thought it was the worst, most hateful and divisive episode I had ever seen in this country. It was sickening; a crowd cheered him along, shouting “Allahu Akbar”.
It revealed a seed of hatred in this country that needed to be suppressed. But there was no police response. No arrests. The following day three things happened.
First, Albanese offered the mildest of responses when shown the footage on morning television, saying the October 7 massacres were not something to be celebrated (you don’t say!).
Second, Albanese went to the Lakemba mosque, a hub for the city’s Sunni Muslim community, close to where Dadoun’s abomination had occurred. The Prime Minister spoke about the voice referendum and did not even mention Dadoun’s speech.
He did not call out those celebrations or use the opportunity to explain that such public sentiments were not acceptable in this nation. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
It was an abrogation of leadership.

Inevitably the illustrations get skewed. No Nazis, or white supremacists, or Xian nationalists, or Zionists conducting an ethnic cleansing here. 

After all, they're the lizard Oz's readership, so cue an image designed to terrify the hive mind, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun at a rally on October 8, 2023 in Lakemba, rejoicing at the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas the day before. Picture: News Corp

It's worth noting that for this 6 minute read, the reptiles trotted out some ten visual distractions ...

And as the dog botherer carried on his listicle countdown, they started to come thick and fast...

Third, guess what, that very evening a crowd of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters marched on the Sydney Opera House chanting “Eff the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews” and by some accounts “Gas the Jews”.
Once more there were no arrests and only mild admonition from our leaders – our governments and law enforcement authorities had clearly decided the relevant tactic here was to avert their eyes and hope it all went away.

Here comes another one, guaranteed to agitate the hive mind, A Free Palestine rally sees protesters burn the Israeli flag on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House, following the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestine in October 2023. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper (Note: no images of a flattened Gaza permitted)

In a way the snaps are a relief, because there's no need to mention that wanton destruction in Gaza, and the cruel use of mass starvation as war tactic and war crime, and so on and so bloody forth...

What a reckless and spineless failure. And we wonder why anti-Semitism rose to unprecedented levels over the ensuing months, with a synagogue burnt to the ground in Melbourne, and cars, shops and even a childcare centre targeted in Sydney.
Such social division and intolerance has never been known in this country during my lifetime. All we get from governments, especially federally, is some false equivalence between the rampant, visceral and problematic anti-Semitism and the almost non-existent Islamophobia. Social cohesion has been lost. And I see no strong effort to restore it.
Albanese’s main response has been to change his foreign policy to abandon those who support Israel and seek to appease feral protesters by recognising the non-existent state of Palestine.
Last week, senior public servants could not say whether Palestine had borders, a government or a capital, and – demonstrating the weakness of the government’s Middle East policy – could not even name the capital of Israel.

Bigots gotta bigot, haters gotta hate ... Such social division and intolerance has never been known in this country during my lifetime. A composite image of the fire damage to the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation synagogue and the alleged arsonist. Picture: Supplied

As well as the bigotry, there was a serve of narcissistic fluff-gathering and navel-gazing:

At its best and as it should be ours truly is the best country in the world. And that’s not a factor of dumb luck, it’s an outcome from natural and cultural blessings to be sure, but also strong institutions, hard work, ingenuity and social commitment.
Australians often like to say we are a small country – this is far from the truth. We are a significant nation: about the 14th or 15th largest economy in the world; our military ranks in the top 20 most powerful; in area we are the sixth largest; and even in population we almost make the top quarter of just under 200 countries. We have a vast continent with an ancient people and culture, we’ve fashioned a longstanding democracy, a tolerably workable federation, a multiethnic and egalitarian success story, and a modern and prosperous exporting economy.
We are a powerhouse of pragmatism, stoicism, intellectual and artistic curiosity, good-humoured sportsmanship and mateship.

Artistic curiosity? The pond knows a few artists, and they wouldn't touch the lizard Oz with a bargepole, not least because it's notoriously incurious and unobservant.

For those who missed the venerable Meade's portrait of cultural insights in the lizard Oz: 

To mark the launch of a new culture section, The Australian has produced a list of the top 25 TV shows of the past 25 years.
The best TV show in the last quarter of a century, as curated by the national broadsheet’s writers, is HBO’s Succession – widely seen, of course, as being heavily inspired by the Murdoch family, the proprietor of News Corp Australia’s flagship newspaper.
The drama in the show even prompted Murdoch’s children to discuss their own public relations strategy for their father’s death, leading to a legal battle in a Nevada court.
“Shakespeare’s King Lear by way of the world’s most torturous corporate offsite,” the paper’s summary reads. “Jesse Armstrong’s saga of the Roys turns boardroom squabbling into grand tragedy. It was terrifyingly funny, and funnily terrifying. Masterful storytelling, razor-sharp writing and unforgettable performances make this show the best in the past 25 years.”
Missing from this description was the name of the family who inspired the esteemed series.
The list was selected by “critics and writers” Geordie Gray, Graeme Blundell, Richard Ferguson, Troy Bramston, Bianca Farmakis, Joseph Carbone, Steve Jackson and Milanda Rout.
Only Blundell, an acclaimed actor as well as a television writer, can legitimately claim to be a TV critic – the others are news reporters and producers – but we digress.
To publicise the new section, the Oz has published a video in which its writers talk about career highlights, including the most famous people they have interviewed (literary editor Caroline Overington: Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton) and the prettiest (former literary editor Stephen Romei: Margot Robbie and George Clooney). Very cultured indeed.

Ah Alvin Purple, and the glorious days of intellectual and artistic curiosity, but working actors gotta work, while bigots gotta bigot... and don't expect the dog botherer to break into a review of The Hack any time soon ...

Now back to the dog botherer, and stand by for the' 'deploring of renewables' part of the listicle.

But I fear much of this is under threat just now. Nothing can kill a self-made country quite like complacency, forgetting your values and favouring ideology over practicality.
We have been making bad decisions. We are doing to our own country what a malevolent rival would want to do to weaken us.
We are surrendering our cheap energy advantage to the expressed but plainly ludicrous aim of saving the planet. We are exporting vast amounts of coal but are determined not to use it ourselves.
And likewise with gas. While our uranium feeds a growing global hunger for emissions-free baseload power, we ban its use here.
This is crippling manufacturing enterprises, sending them offshore where they use fossil-fuel fired electricity and send emissions into the same atmosphere we breathe. Genius.
We subsidise renewable energy to force out coal-fired generation, then subsidise coal-fired generators to keep going because renewables cannot do the job. We subsidise renewable projects, battery projects and green hydrogen projects that do not work.
Then we subsidise household electricity bills because all this forces prices sky high. Now we also subsidise copper smelters because they cannot bear the extreme power prices.
This is a power Ponzi scheme. We all pay, and the energy companies all win.

Would it pass as a reptile piece if it didn't have a way to gas the planet? At Tokyo Bay, a large tanker arrives carrying Liquefied Natural Gas from the north-west of Australia. Picture: Supplied

Then it was on with the litany of thought crimes ...

Overburdening regulation stymies investment. Mining or industrial projects can be blocked by marginal environmental scares or contested Indigenous claims. We have racked up $1 trillion of debt yet Canberra spends like never before. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is out of control and we find ever more new ways to spend public money.
We have weakened our education systems, lowering standards and undermining faith in our country, its history and its values. We are so overcome by cultural ambivalence and weakened institutions that we cannot say whether our history is proud or tragic.
Nor can we tell a man from a woman.

Hang on, hang on, the pond usually lets TG hate speech go through to the keeper, but the notion that gender being fluid is a recent thing is beyond abysmally ignorant. Why it might even suggest we weakened education standards long ago when the dog botherer was in school.

Putting on an 'Our Henry' hat, the pond turned to Roman Emperor Elagabalus, 218-222, 

...Some writers suggest that Elagabalus may have identified as female or been transgender, and may have sought sex reassignment surgery. Dio says Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles's mistress, wife, and queen. The emperor reportedly wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, and supposedly offered vast sums to any physician who could provide him with a vagina by means of incision (Cassius Dio, Roman History, 80.16.7). Some historians, including the classicists Mary Beard, Zachary Herz, and Martijn Icks, treat these accounts with caution, as sources for Elagabalus' life were often antagonistic towards him and largely untrustworthy

Well yes, whatever, who wants to be bearded by Beard, but at least all that shows that the notion of gender fluidity was alive and well long ago, and long before Elagabalus. (Don't get the bible started on eunuchs)

Lawrence Alma-Tadema caught the spirit in a later, but still remote Victorian time ...

Aw, how pretty, and dammit, that's vastly more amusing than the last reptile visual distraction, an entirely meaningless and gratuitous snap of an ABC sign ... Topping it off, taxpayers fund a public broadcasting behemoth that divides the nation and undercuts social cohesion, rather than uniting or scrutinising government. Picture: AAP

Thank the long absent lord, bad things must at some time end ...

Before we came to our senses and decided to buy US nuclear-powered submarines, we commissioned the French to redesign a nuclear submarine with diesel engines – like putting a Victa in a Ferrari. We also have made ourselves economically dependent on China – our main strategic threat – by failing to diversify our markets.
Topping it all off, we force taxpayers to fund a public broadcasting behemoth that instead of binding the nation together, or holding governments to account, encourages these dead ends and undercuts social cohesion. It is a sorry saga of self-harm.
To paraphrase John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Think not what our enemies might do to our country, think about what we are doing to ourselves.
This is an edited version of Chris Kenny’s Goldstein Address delivered this week in Melbourne.

He dared to mention JFK, while RFK trashes the brand and King Donald trashes America? Is there soap handy so he can wash out his reptilian mouth?

And while bad things end, it's only so more bad things can begin.

Come on down Dame Slap, doing a full 10 minutes, an Everest to climb that's as bad as nattering "Ned" ...

The header: Could it be true that women are to blame for cancel culture?, Commentator Helen Andrews says an increasingly feminised society is to blame for wokeness and the undermining of our institutions. But she may be missing the real problem.

The caption: American commentator Helen Andrews, right, a​rgues an increasingly feminised society is to blame for wokeness and the undermining of our institutions. Pictures: istock/Supplied

Sorry, that mention of wokeness immediately triggered a pond contractual requirement ...

How the bloody woke have ruined everything, how we can save the worldfrom the woke ...

'Toon entertainment aside, which has been designed to appeal to manly men interested in being the new Cap'n Ahab (can you be as manly as Greg Peck?), what follows is of strictly limited appeal, the arcana of conservative women going at each other, a field sport that Dame Slap plays with enthusiasm ...

If we were in the business of trigger warnings, this column would start as follows: many women – and some men – may need a quiet room with puppies and Play-Doh after reading The Great Feminisation by American commentator Helen Andrews.
Andrews, a social conservative, would likely say that proves her point – her point being that our increasingly feminised society is to blame for wokeness and the undermining of our institutions.
Fortunately, we’re not in the business of mollycoddling readers.
Still, let’s take this slowly by starting with the safe leftish orthodoxy when discussing sexual differences.
Estonia’s first female prime minister said once that more female leaders would mean less violence.
Presumably she meant fewer wars. She forgets that Maggie Thatcher’s swift and decisive defence of the Falklands after Argentina invaded defined her leadership.
Jacinda Ardern has built a post-political career on assuring us people are seeking more kindness and empathy from their leaders.
Neither trait sorted out her country’s rising inflation or the doubling of mortgage rates facing New Zealanders.
We’ve been programmed to lionise female attributes – and criticise male attributes. How many times do we read about the wicked “boys’ club” in a week?
There is another view. In a piece published in online magazine Compact last week, Andrews set out a different take on the feminisation of society.
It’s not a good thing, she says, that the workplace is replacing male attributes with female ones. In short, women are too woke to run our institutions.
She’s not alone, by the way, in turning the tables and suggesting men are better in leadership positions.
Andrews says her epiphany came in 2019 after reading an article about Harvard president Larry Summers.

The reptiles followed with another snap, and at that point the pond, not so much snapping, as twigging, immediately got it ... Helen Andrews speaks at the National Conservative Convention in Washington in September this year. Picture: Middle East Images via AFP

Of course, of course, it's immediately apparent, though few would dare to say it. No wonder she's grumpy, no wonder she feels alienated ...

The poor thing.

Why she lacks a key ingredient, the Mar-a-Lago look, the Mar-a-Lago face, available to men and women (caution that's a Daily Snail link).

There's no way she can get into Valhalla and be given a Viking send off by Keystone Kash ...

Worse, Dame Slap wasn't on board...

Cancel culture
Summers was forced to resign in 2006 after suggesting “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might partly explain the under-representation of women in the upper levels of science and engineering.
A woman who complained said when Summers started talking about innate sex differences, she “couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill”.
“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organisation or field,” Andrews writes, in agreement with the article about the downfall of Summers.
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behaviour applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?”
She said she was thrilled with her discovery.
I say she’s misconceived, in important respects.
But first to her claims that feminisation explains why emotion and politics rather than logic and evidence have apparently triumphed in Western public life.
Some of Andrews’ observations about how women, generally speaking, do things differently to men is not off the mark. The emphasis is on “generally speaking”.
She says wokeness prioritises “the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”.
And “Female group dynamics favour consensus and co-operation. Men order each other around but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated … men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracise their enemies.”
Are you cringing in recognition at these behavioural differences?
If so, then maybe we can agree that some men and some women sometimes behave differently to the opposite sex.
But Andrews starts to go off the rails when she asserts that feminisation is the cause of the politicisation of professions, from medicine and academia to the media and business.
What frightens Andrews most is the feminisation of the law, where women have been pouring out of law schools in greater numbers than men, moving into law firms, the Bar, courts, law reform commissions and prosecutor’s offices. “To be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” Andrews writes.
She predicts that a feminised legal system might look something like Title IX processes for sexual assaults established at American universities during the Obama era.
The Kavanaugh case

Andrews is right that the safeguards that apply in the legal system didn’t apply in Title IX proceedings on campus, leading to ridiculous situations where those accused of sexual assaults were not told who their accusers were.
Andrews points to the poisonous confirmation hearings of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a sign of what happens when women call the shots.
A “masculine position” is to say that if there is not enough evidence, then claims by Christine Blasey Ford – that she was sexually assaulted by Kavanagh when they were teenagers – must not ruin his career as a jurist.

Phew, that was a long gobbet, but it's easy to see why Dame Slap was sensitive, what with being a sometime lawyer and relentlessly scribbling about law and activist judges and such like and trading on her degree ...

That's feminisation of the law and journalism right there, and clearly it's just so wrong ... Protesters dressed in The Handmaid's Tale costume, protest outside the hearing room where Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh was due to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in September, 2018. Picture: AFP

How good is it to see the reptiles take over that sort of imagery for a good cause ... 

Now be quick about it, and slip in a good word for a harasser ... wouldn't want to appear to have gone completely girlie and tealie ...

The “feminine position”, says Andrews, was that “her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect”.
What happened to Kavanagh was wrong.
A small group of women was determined to keep him off the Supreme Court. But was it driven by a feminine position or a political one?
The growing derision for fundamental legal principles concerns me, too. God knows I have reported and commented at length on the worst excesses of Australia’s legal system – some at the hands of women.
Our first female Chief Justice of the High Court, Susan Kiefel, was wrong to judge and publicly execute (in a reputational sense) former justice Dyson Heydon for alleged harassment.
Heydon had denied the allegations. There was no trial, only an internal review that Heydon did not participate in.
The result – Heydon’s removal – may have been emotionally satisfying to many people, especially some women, but was it legally rigorous?
Like many lawyers, I worry that feeling good overrides good process in our legal system these days.

Ah, we know the reason feeling good overrides good process these days, look, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Susan Kiefel after being sworn in. Picture: Kym Smith

'Nuff said, as Dame Slap realised where all this was heading, what with her obviously ruining both the law and journalism ...

Federal Court Chief Justice Debra Mortimer, for example, has had her photo taken with native title litigants. This may endear the Federal Court to native title claimants and their supporters, but those defending these claims in the future may not feel so loved.
This newspaper has reported on a string of cases in which judges have accused the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, run by Sally Dowling, of running baseless sexual assault prosecutions that have no hope of securing a conviction. This push for “victim-centric justice” – even before the law has ruled that there is, on the evidence, a victim – may hearten alleged complainants.
However, we should ask whether it also has every prospect of damaging the lives of men who should be presumed innocent.
Problem transcends the sexes
Wokeness, to use the common catch-all phrase, has a more serious and negative impact in some fields – like the law – where it has encouraged a growing disdain for, and ignorance of, fundamental legal principles.
But this is not simply feminisation at work – the problem transcends the sexes.
Plenty of male lawyers, many of them senior silks and heads of legal institutions, are complicit in this crisis of confidence in fundamental legal principles.
When an issue of major legal importance pops up challenging the value of, say, the presumption of innocence or equality under the law, they are nowhere to be seen.
Men are not cowering because the law is feminised; they are an inherent part of the problem. We saw that with the voice.

Cue another reason feeling good overrides good process these day, look, NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling SC leaving Newcastle Supreme Court. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Dame Slap was torn, what with being a part of the problem, and not a part of the solution ...

Andrews doesn’t address the role that politics as a new form of morality – and practised by both sexes – has played in the decline of our institutions.
According to the 2021 census, almost 40 per cent of Australians say they have no religion, an increase from 30 per cent in 2016 and 22 per cent in 2011. People will, however, find their moral codes elsewhere.
For an increasing number of Australians, in all walks of life including the law, it appears to be in politics.
Political debates have become a battle between good and bad.
When there are no churches to practise one’s faith, adherents of this politics-as-morality secular religion take it into the workplace, into schools and universities, on to social media.
It’s said that the best way to sharpen our ideas and thinking is to read material we disagree with. That’s true.
But it is equally true that honing our thoughts can come from reading something we think we might agree with – only to disagree with it because it forced us to think some more. That’s what Andrews’ piece did for me.
Andrews says “the problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminised, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?”
I am receptive to Andrews’ arguments.
But not in agreement.
If anything, her claims convinced me that only on a lazy day could I get on board with the idea that women are responsible for our woke society.
It’s easy. It’s neat.
The rise of the teals in Australia is, after all, largely a female-driven phenomenon, and most of the teals fall squarely inside the woke framework that might broadly be defined as “caring” and talking endlessly about everything under the sun.

Go for it Dame Slap, don't let saucy doubts and fears hold you back, blame womyn, blame yourself, blame anyone who hovers into view, look, Debby Blakey. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

How to resolve it?

Here's Dame Slap, joyous warrior and reviler of the woke and cancel culture, and suddenly someone's suggesting she's part of the problem?!

'This cannot stand ...

In business, the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, led by prominent female leaders Debby Blakey and Louise Davidson, played an out-size role in foisting ESG mania on listed companies.
This contributed to the unplugged wokedom that helped unravel the Australian Securities Exchange’s Corporate Governance Council last week.
But neat and simple answers won’t do, even if they appear thrilling.
Feminisation might be a small part of it because some women have decided to pursue other agendas within these institutions.

She's always been agin the woke and wokedom.

Dame Slap was so mortified, so suffused with saucy doubts and fears, she had to explain her journey ...

Tripping into wokedom
But it’s equally evident that plenty of men are hellbent on turning their backs on truth in the lecture room or are too afraid to make enemies to be great journalists or are mediocre compliance types rather than brave corporate leaders.
I tripped into wokedom, unexpectedly, in the late 1990s, before there was a word for it. I didn’t go looking for trouble. I only wanted to find the best way to teach my first child, who was about three years old, how to read.
I came across something called “literacy for social justice”. That’s what its proponents called it. This was mainstream literacy teaching. It assured us that kids would learn to read, indeed become critical readers pushing back against the power structures of the oppressive West, by showing them whole words, rather than using traditional phonetic methods – or direct instruction – by teaching kids the sounds that make up words.
“Literacy for social justice” may well be the single biggest reason for Australia’s falling literacy rates.
Even in a profession that has been predominantly female for many decades, this literacy for social justice bunkum was very much the brainchild of male academics, most prominently an academic named Brian Cambourne.
Here’s Cambourne in an interview published in 2001: “This view of literacy (for social justice) sees literacy as inherently political in several ways. For example, it assumes that in our society … there are groups and individuals who are constantly engaged in acquiring more and more power and wealth at the expense of others … A related assumption is that language can be used to either include or exclude people or groups of people from different kinds of power and rewards.”

Gasp, could it be bloody men? Had they cleverly fitted up womyn with wokedom, even though nobody had much of a clue what it meant, except that you didn't like someone, and this was a simple form of abuse, as subtle and as nuanced as talking of Karens or Janets ...

Dame Slap had to take a stand, and so a stand she took, even if it didn't come from Pelosi's office ...

Mistaking generalisations for facts
The modern battle to dislodge or dilute traditional concepts, be it how to teach a kid to read, or who owns corporations, or whether we should respect the presumption of innocence, or abide by the rule of law, is fundamentally one about power that very often transcends gender.
Andrews’ diagnosis of the cause of woke agendas suffers from the very problem she describes. It mistakes generalities for facts. Could it be that Andrews has fallen hook, line and sinker for identity politics – it’s just that her chosen group of wicked (and woke) oppressors are women? When it comes to human beings, generalisations are superficially attractive but also frequently wrong. Much better to judge people on their individual characteristics rather than on characteristics they might be presumed to have by virtue of their membership of some collective group.
Women, in particular, have suffered greatly from generalisations based on their sex. Now that we have, in large part, won the battle not to be judged as an indistinguishable collective rather than as individuals, we should take great care not to inflict the same error on ourselves. Women open the door to reductive claims about women when we make reductive claims about men. Phrases like “toxic masculinity”, “mansplaining” and the like should be retired – or at least relegated to comedy skits.
In the end, the biggest problem with Andrews’ claims is that her suggested fix lacks logic. Andrews says we can turn the “Great Feminisation” project around if we return to fair rules, for example, by employing people based on merit – rather than blindly following anti-discrimination diktats that every workplace be feminised.
We do need to revert to fair rules. I love merit. But this won’t necessarily fix the problem as described by Andrews.
If Andrews thinks female academics are less interested in the truth, and female journalists are less interested in making enemies to get the big story, and female lawyers are less interested in legal principles that underpin our society, and so on, then surely the logical conclusion is that we need to have fewer women in these fields to ensure the best outcomes.
That is crazy – it amounts to a new form of discrimination.

Oh come on, it's working a treat for the Pentagon thanks to manlier than man champagne Pete, busy whipping the lads into shape (and do they need a lot of Percy Grainger whipping)  ...

It's easy to see why Dame Slap got so defensive.

Fancy someone from further right than her daring to think she might be the problem.

What a pearl clutching that produced, what a staking of claims that she knew how to spot cancel culture and decry the woke, just don't lump her in with all womynkind...

But employing fewer women is the logical end point if one genuinely believes that women have different traits to men that lead to worse outcomes. A greater focus on appointing people – men and women – on individual merit, according to their professional skills, and ignoring their sex or their politics will improve our institutions.
It will help weed out sloppy thinking driven by wishy-washy political agendas – among men and women.
I am not a fan of Kiefel’s treatment of Heydon, Mortimer’s choice of photo opportunities, Dowling’s office launching doomed prosecutions, or of the relentless do-gooding of female-led ACSI and HESTA.
But those things are errors of judgment by individuals, not of womankind.
Just as readers who disagree with this column should blame what they regard as errors on me, not on my sex.

What a hoot and yet surely the thesis is correct, surely masterly, manly men are the way foreward ...

You want someone to hold a chainsaw? 

You don't need some butch lesbian, you need a clutch of manly men ...

That's the manly man spirit ...

After Donald Trump's $40 billion bailout of Argentina, the United States is now tied to the economic fortunes of a country that was once the wealthiest in the world but now ranks just below Kazakhstan. The American taxpayer will be on the hook for a government that has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times, three of those in the last twenty-five years.
But let’s set aside for now the question of whether the bailout is a good idea or a bad one. What strikes me about the Argentina story is how much that country’s history holds up an uncomfortable mirror to our own history of the last few years.
I don’t just mean Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since 2003, who is so Trump-like that Trump is apparently willing to stake his political fortunes on rescuing him. Rather, the parallels go back to Juan and Eva Perón, and the Perónism that Trumpism is slowly beginning to resemble.
Juan Perón was elected Argentina’s president in 1946; his charismatic, if sometimes cartoonish, populism has towered over Argentine politics ever since. With his wife Eva—probably most familiar to Americans as the subject of the musical Evita—Perón crashed onto Argentina’s political scene in a moment of post-war upheaval. The country’s once-dizzying economic explosion was floundering. The Peróns’ populist appeals tapped into deep discontent among Argentina’s working classes toward urban and cosmopolitan elites in Buenos Aires.
The Peróns harnessed legitimate grievances about a deeply inegalitarian society segregated by class and geography. A former military officer, Perón fused populism with economic nationalism and bellicose rhetoric. Together, husband and wife were masters of propaganda and new communications tools—especially radio—using them to bypass mediating political powers and speak directly to voters.
Once in office, Perón governed with a heavy-handed and personalist style. Corruption ran rampant. He and his successors built a sprawling network of patronage and clientelism. He preferred to manage Argentina’s economy directly with tariffs, personal deals, and manipulation of monetary policy. Instead of a clear ideological vision, his populist protectionism was mostly instinctive and reactive.
The effects were disastrous...

There you go, manly men doing manly things, and the least that Dame Slap can do is discreetly retire, and set up shop as a domesticated home body.

Forsake the law and journalism! Enough with all this woke nonsense, this pretending that you can be good at it.

And once she's gone, there'll be even more room for manly men to whip the world into shape ...

Go beer lovers ... for when the glove doesn't fit you must acquit, and when you're brown, you can be taken down town (Petula Clark permitting) ...