In which the disingenuous Killer and the deflecting Our Henry disappoint ...

The federal government is going to experience an enormous amount of pain come December, come its half-baked rolling out of its social media activism.

There have already been rumblings...which will only get louder. Try the keen Keane in Crikey yesterday, savaging the enormous stupidity of the AFR ...

If you want brain rot, read the Financial Review (and leave gen Z out of it), Young people are suffering from ‘brain rot’, claims the AFR, and it’s all due to social media. But there’s another reason why young people are so unhappy. (sorry, paywall)

“The social media ban could cure gen Z’s brain rot,” opined the Financial Review’s anonymous editorial today, arguing that the government’s asinine and privacy-eroding social media ban for children would address “the corrosive toll aspects of social media have taken on entire generations — particularly young people”.
Peddling the discredited claims of Jonathan Haidt, the AFR pins the blame for “anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers” on social media, which “actively cannibalises young people’s time in developing essential skills”, stops kids from going out and kicking a footy around and “handed tech titans free rein to exploit the impressionable nature of young people”.
(Those are the same tech titans that the AFR’s owner, Nine Entertainment, has been lobbying against for years, but let’s leave aside the AFR’s blatant conflict of interest for the moment.)
As I’ve argued elsewhere, there are respectable arguments, from people far better credentialed than Haidt, that the availability of social media has played some role, as well as merely being correlative, with the onset of what appears to be a global decline in the mental health of younger people.
But how bizarre to assert that social media is uniquely damaging to young people. Spend five minutes on Facebook and you can see how crazed many boomers are as they swap conspiracy theories, recycle misinformation and amplify lies. Who voted for Trump in huge numbers? Older Americans, especially men. Who hates immigration? Older people, especially boomers. Research shows older people are uniquely susceptible to fake news.
And there are other, and likely more significant, factors in young people’s mental health that social media has served to amplify, rather than itself being a cause. At the core of those factors is intergenerational inequity, and the extent to which boomers and gen Xers (like me) have, across Western and especially Anglophone countries, tilted the scales against, made life harder for, and immiserated young people.
We’ve inflicted massive tuition debt on them when we got educated for free. We’ve skewed the tax system so that wealth and assets are taxed more lightly than income, and favoured investors over young people trying to enter the housing market. We’ve given seniors more and more benefits and showered more and more spending on them via the health and caring systems, while we’ve nickel-and-dimed the education system and imposed far greater precarity on young workers, who are prime targets for employers to exploit and abuse. We’ve allowed large companies to grow ever more dominant, giving them more and more market power to abuse and giving them ever-greater margins, forcing up prices and interest rates.
And most of all, we’re burning the planet, heedless of the massive costs that the climate crisis is already inflicting and which will continue to grow rapidly, making the lives of young people in the future markedly poorer than if we’d taken the relatively straightforward and cost-effective decisions to decarbonise our economy.
You want to know why young people have anxiety, depression and self-harm? Because older people are fucking them over pretty much every way they can.
And who champions that comprehensive fucking over? The Financial Review. The AFR isn’t the same as News Corp, the entire business model of which is to divide people, foster rage and hate and undermine social cohesion...

Stop right there, the pond can't quote all the keen Keane, there has to be some left for Crikey, and besides what better way to segue into the reptiles this Friday than with that nod to climate science denialism division, rage, hate and the undermining of social cohesion?

The pond has no idea how the reptiles will play the December roll out. 

They love to peddle Haidt (it sort of rhymes with Hate), and they too like to savage their rivals in the social media space.

But what of libertarians of the Killer Creighton kind? What of the alleged free thinkers, who think they're freely thinking while lurking inside the hive mind? What of the loons that rail at big government and government interference?

It's going to be difficult times not just for the government but for the reptiles, who will have to decide whether to walk with the molly-coddling politically correct woke mob, or who will have to take a line popular with their arch-enemies, if only so they can bash the government.

All that sport can be saved for later. 

But why did the pond start that way, by going there?

Well today is a by the numbers outing. 

There's very little in the headlines worth noting, with mean girl Linda leading the way ...

Mean girl Linda is completely clueless, apparently unaware that she too plays a mean 'mean girl' game, and the pond thought so little of all the stories that punters will have to head off to the archive themselves...

Over on the extreme far right, the results were equally dismal ...

More of Rowan, Will and minerals anon in a late arvo post.

As for the two Friday regulars, Killer and Our Henry, what a disappointment they were.

Killer himself was well below form.

The header: Australian citizenship worth tougher test – and greater reward, The embarrassingly easy nature of Australia’s citizenship test, and the shockingly low pass rates, suggests Australian citizenship isn’t worth as much as it should be.

The typo-blessed caption for the truly pathetic illustration: Australia’s citizenship tshould  (sic) be laughably simple for new arrivals, based on the 20-question, multiple choice practice exam available on the Department of Home Affairs website.

The pond gets it. Attacking difficult, uppity, wretchedly ignorant furriners, unworthy as potential Oz citizens, lazy scum who want to pollute dinkum Oz soil, is an easy, somewhat disingenuous way to maintain the rage, fear and loathing, with Killer cunningly parading his own ignorance as a way to start the dissembling...

Having lived in Britain for a few years I thought I’d ace the country’s 24-question, multiple choice citizenship test: not so. I wrongly thought habeas corpus emerged in 1685, not 1679; Catherine Howard was Anne Boleyn’s sister, not cousin. The blind, not the deaf, receive a 50 per cent discount on their TV licence. Farmers arrived in Britain 6000 not 8000 years ago. And the monarch can still make hereditary but not life peers without the advice of the prime minister.
Fortunately, I knew Robert Walpole’s term as prime minister ended in 1742, Edward Elgar didn’t write The Planets, and it was the Jutes not the Normans who invaded Britain first after the Romans left. I could still scrape above the 75 per cent pass in two of the practice quizzes I tried provided by Britizen.uk for wannabe British subjects, but it wasn’t easy.
Australia’s test by contrast should be laughably simple for new arrivals, based on the 20-question, multiple choice practice exam available on the Department of Home Affairs website. Given a 75 per cent pass mark – and an easier three, rather than four, response choices – it’s hard to see how anyone could fail it.

The reptiles showed the real game by introducing the lesser Leeser having a chat with the dog botherer, replete with obligatory flag-waving ... Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser discusses the risks which should be considered in immigration. “The key fundamentals of the citizenship pledge is that you have some loyalty to Australia, that you respect our laws and abide by them, and that you respect the rights and liberties of other people,” Mr Lesser told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “That’s been the problem in the last two years, there’ve been too many people here who haven’t respected the rights and liberties of other people or accepted the laws of this country. “We’re seeing governments who have failed to enforce those laws.”

So Killer of the IPA was just filing a party line post ...

What are the colours of the Australian Aboriginal flag? Are men and woman equal under the law? What’s the capital? Is volunteering important because it “strengthens the community” or “is required”? Did Australia become a nation in 1901 or 2001? You get the idea.
Yet incredibly, pass rates on the first attempt have fallen to around 65 per cent since 2022, from 80 per cent in the late 2010s, according to departmental data released last year. I could understand citizens having a tougher time.

Killer cunningly worked his climate science denialism into the screed.

I was tempted to answer that the government “tells people which religion to follow” (climate change) rather than the desired “is separate from any religion”. 

Ho, ho, ho, a certifiable Xmas cracker joke ... but the pond felt very disappointed by this outing ...

Similarly, I think answering that freedom of speech “is not an Australian value” is more accurate than “underpins Australia’s democratic system”, given the massive crackdown on free speech in NSW and Victoria since last year, where even “severe ridicule” of politically favoured groups is now illegal.

But what of December? Killer was silent, surprisingly evasive ...settling on other feeble comedy routines:

And given much of the bureaucracy can’t even define what a woman is, selecting “men have more rights than women” instead of “are equal” would be understandable. As for “Who can deliver a welcome to country?”, typical price tags well above $1000 (including smoking) might prompt some to answer they are performed by a “master of ceremonies” rather than traditional Aboriginal custodians.

Ah, a tidy bit of black bashing there, but at this point in the low comedy came a billy goat butt, in the form of a "more seriously", which suggests that those bloody difficult, uppity furriners should lift their game ...

More seriously, the embarrassingly easy nature of Australia’s citizenship test, and the shockingly low pass rates, suggests Australian citizenship isn’t worth as much as it should be. It’s relatively easy to obtain once a permanent resident, yet census data suggest more than a fifth of permanent residents don’t bother becoming citizens after even a decade. Around 11 per cent of Australia’s population is on a temporary visa (2.88 million as of December last year), a massively higher share than in Canada, the US or the UK, and approximately another 5 per cent are permanent residents.
This week the ABS reported more than 467,400 permanent or long-term arrivals, in net terms, for the 12 months to August, the highest-ever level over any 12-month period to August. A big share of these arrivals would be international students, temporary workers and their families eager to obtain not citizenship but permanent residency, which provides the bulk of the benefits of living and working in Australia.
In the 12 months to June, 165,193 people became Australian citizens, including over 33,000 from New Zealand, more than any other nation. Fewer than 5200 mainland Chinese, for instance, became citizens, although more than 655,000 live in Australia. This is understandable given China doesn’t recognise dual citizenship, but to which nation does this very large group owe its allegiance? Were a geopolitical crisis ever to arise in the Indo-Pacific, this would be nice to know.
India similarly doesn’t allow dual citizenship but over 23,000 of around 900,000 Indian residents took up citizenship. The ability to vote is the main difference in rights between citizens and permanent residents, and any rational voter knows his or her vote makes no difference to the outcome. In fact, permanent residency is even better for those residents who don’t want to be fined for not voting.

At this point the reptiles upped the mockery ... Migrants practice for the citizenship test by playing a form of Snakes and Ladders.

In the end, it was just another Oz rant on "Australian values", though Killer spared the hive mind a rant explaining that "Australian values" were in reality Anglo-Celtic values, or perhaps "Western Civilisation" values, or Judaeo-Xian values, or perhaps the lingering thought that we might be best off with "British empire values" ... and being Killer, punitive measures were contemplated to enforce the right mindset ...

Australia would be a stronger nation if more of the people living here permanently had signed up properly to Australian values. Indefinite free-riding as a permanent resident shouldn’t be allowed after, say, a decade. HECS loans are not available to permanent residents, but this precedent could be extended much further. Public housing and even Medicare could be restricted only to citizens, saving billions of dollars a year; or permanent residents could pay a higher Medicare Levy. Only citizens should be able to have a say in local planning and to vote in local elections.
Permanent residents and temporary visa holders should be deported to their home countries if convicted of violent crimes. A new probationary citizenship visa could be created: break the law and tumble automatically back to permanent residency. And Australia’s citizenship test could easily be as difficult as the UK’s too; we might not be as old, but we have a rich, complex history, replete with achievements, from the Snowy Mountains Scheme to the early adoption of civil rights for women, at least when we could define them. And we could swap out the question on welcomes to country with one that inculcates the correct understanding of the 1967 referendum.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

There is much King Donald in this one ...

Our Henry was also a disappointment, offered an easy chance to deflect, and seizing it with sanctimonious, righteous glee ...

The header: Exploiting the Holocaust is an idiot’s game, Phillip Adams joins a long line that stretches from neo-Nazis to Islamists in using the Holocaust to make cheap anti-Israel points.

The caption: Jews being led for deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

It's easy enough to see why Our Henry took the easy low road. 

The pond has always had a particular dislike for the indefensible Adams, purporting to be the resident ABC cardigan-wearing leftie when he was really just a rich advertising man in disguise, with far too much sense of self-importance, regularly on parade in the lizard Oz, and avoided by the pond like the plague.

Even worse, this time he allowed Our Henry to play the Holocaust card, thereby allowing Our Henry an easy rhetorical way out of the wretched recent genocidal, ethnic cleansing, mass starvation and mass punishment ways of the current government of Israel ...

Earlier this week, as Israelis celebrated the return of hostages who had been beaten, starved and terrorised by their captors, Phillip Adams marked the day by posting that “7000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto. 68,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza”.

Surely not. 

Surely even the deeply pathetic Adams wouldn't have been such a doofus, and in the reptile way, there was no link to check ... 

And yet when the pond did a search, even X, deep that sewer pit, deeply mired in hate speech, had to add a "context" to the post ...

Adams is now old, but senility is no excuse, and it gave Our Henry an easy way to deflect ...

It may be that Adams, like so many of his acolytes, has discarded the entire notion of facts as mere right-wing nonsense. It is, however, a fact that the Warsaw Ghetto held some 450,000 Jews, of whom barely 30,000 survived, with at least 80,000 dying in the Ghetto itself and 340,000 being murdered during the successive deportations or in the concentration camps.
Adams has, in other words, simply confected his numbers. But even putting aside the Holocaust denialism, what his claim reveals is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of moral judgment.
Good and evil are not measured by counting bodies. No person who has any grasp of what those terms mean would think it better to let one innocent child die so that two murderers can live than to kill two murderers so as to save that child’s life.

The reptiles followed up the angle with a snap, Young Jewish men being carted off in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941.

The Adams flub allowed Our Henry to get on a Domain soap box, and set forth a stream of righteous indignation and moralising...

Rather, every moral judgment involves the application of moral principles to a real or conjectured fact situation. And the reality is that the horror of the Holocaust lies precisely in the fact that its victims’ only crime was that of existing.
Not even Adams could claim that the men, women and children who were rounded up from all ends of Europe and shipped to the gas chambers had invaded Germany, raped, abducted and tortured innocent Germans, and planned the systematic extermination of the German people. Nor could anyone seriously contend that the death of Europe’s Jews was functional to, or the unintended consequence of, Germany’s war effort.
It is, on the contrary, the abyss that separates the absolute innocence, and pitiful defencelessness, of its victims from the murderous, coolly deliberate cruelty of its all-powerful perpetrators that has made the Holocaust the defining symbol of evil.
And it is precisely the Holocaust’s symbolic role as the epitome of inhumanity – and as the epitome, in particular, of inhumanity towards Jews – that has made comparing Israel’s conduct to that of the Nazis so attractive to anti-Semites, including the Islamists and their fellow travellers.
Those comparisons, which parasitically derive their emotive force from the sheer horror the Holocaust evokes, are hardly new. Less than six months after Israel’s declaration of independence, Arnold Leese, a Nazi sympathiser in the UK, and Francis Parker Yockey, an influential American neo-Nazi, started the process. Zionism, said Leese, was “the new fascism”, to which Yockey added that Israel was “a racial tyranny that surpasses anything the West has known”.
By 1952, the leading American neo-Nazi paper was accusing Israel of “committing genocide against Arabs”, with that accusation becoming a standard trope of former Nazis and Nazi sympathisers worldwide.

You see?

What an excellent distraction, what a way to cast Adams as marching in step with neo-Nazis, and just to remember this lickspittle fellow traveller with the lizard Oz, the reptiles provided a snap, Broadcaster and journalist Phillip Adams. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

That set off Our Henry on fresh ways to avoid mentioning the past few years of ethnic cleansing and wanton physical destruction in Gaza, the enormity of which is just being confirmed, as in this BBC report, 'Worse than starting from scratch': How big is the task of rebuilding Gaza?

There was some astonishing footage and astonishing sights - the pond dragged the button a little to show more of the destruction ...

Or this, While the eyes of the world are on Gaza, Israeli settlers in the West Bank still behave with impunity.

And so on, and thanks to the doofus Adams, Our Henry could avoid dealing with any of this ...

The tactic they used bears more than a passing resemblance to Adams’s: they minimised, when they did not entirely deny, the scale of the Holocaust, while implying or contending that whatever that scale may have been, Israel’s conduct was 10 times worse.
Given the dense linkages between neo- and former Nazis and the Arab regimes, it did not take long for those regimes to follow suit, with the Egyptian government declaring in 1952 that “Israel has carried out the same acts as the Nazis against Palestine”.

See how easy the smear works? Nazi and even worse Egyptian and Commie thinking ...

The bitterly anti-Semitic Soviet bloc also promptly joined in. Although the first instances date to the early 1950s, it was during the Six Day War that the Soviet efforts rose to global prominence.
On June 1, 1967, just as the war was about to get under way, Ahmed Shukeiri, the first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, confidently asserted that “after this war, there will hardly be any Jewish survivors”. At the same time, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced “this will be total war: our aim will be to destroy Israel”. And the Voice of Palestine, broadcasting from Cairo, vowed that the “Arab forces” would show “no mercy to (Jewish) women and children”.
But none of that stopped Soviet ambassador to the UN Nikolai Fedorenko from declaring on June 9, 1967, when Israel had decisively prevented another holocaust, that Israel’s “methods” were a mere copy of “fascist aggression”. “Israel’s leaders,” Fedorenko told the Security Council, should, like their Nazi role models, “be put in the dock for crimes against peace and humanity”.
It was, however, another declaration made on June 9, 1967 that proved especially consequential. The head of East Germany’s propaganda department decreed that the key aim of Communist agitation, including in the West German student movement it had extensively infiltrated, should be to disseminate the claim that “the Israeli imperialists have exactly imitated Hitler’s illegal methods”.
Immediately picked up by the German far left, the contention spread internationally with the speed of a pandemic – and despite the collapse of the Communist bloc, the tarring of Israel with the brush of Nazism has only become ever more widespread.
The sin that involves, as even stalwart but intelligent leftists, such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas, immediately pointed out, did not merely lie in its grotesque distortion of historical reality. Nor was the risk it posed simply that by assimilating Israelis to Nazis, it justified every violence committed against them and, soon enough, against Jews – a risk that quickly became a reality.

Throw in a snap of Hannah Arendt, and you've confirmed your deep philosophical credentials ...

So much easier to romp in the past than to confront current realities, or even graphs ...

And so on, and so thanks to the doofus Adams, Our Henry could rage on in righteous indignation without having to deal with current realities. 

Instead he's able to go all biblical in his denunciation ...

Rather, the immense danger lay in what it betrayed: a complete loss of the faculty of moral judgment by young people trapped in what Adorno called the “neue Dummheit” (new stupidity) of “Halbbildung” (a half education).
In effect, the very essence of moral judgment is the capacity to make distinctions: judging, as Hannah Arendt put it, “is one of the fundamental activities of the human mind by which we affirm that something is this and not that”. It relies, more than any other activity, on “the capacity for discrimination – seeing particulars in their specificity”, which is the basic intellectual and moral act that keeps the world intelligible.
The refusal to face reality in all of its immediacy, particularity and complexity, rather than conveniently “explaining it away” through comparisons as mendacious as they are simplistic, is, Arendt argued, a “refusal to think”.
And nothing more surely eliminates the “only safeguard” that “may prevent catastrophes”, such as a recurrence of totalitarianism, than that “utter thoughtlessness”.
That is why anyone who accepts the biblical warning that “with the judgment you make, you will be judged” knows that moral judgments have to be made in fear and trembling: because unlike God, we suffer from systemic defects in our moral imagination and from intellectual defects in our knowledge of facts; and because when passing judgment degenerates into fanatical righteousness, it becomes a source of evil rather than a force for good.
That is the tragedy of our age: we have raised and educated a generation that is largely ignorant of the caveats, the care and the caution an understanding of human fallibility instils. I thought Phillip Adams knew better. That he has now stooped so low is far worse than a pity. It is a disgrace.

Actually there's two disgraces at work here. 

Adams has always been a fellow-travelling Murdochian disgrace, littering the lizard Oz with his droppings, and the other disgrace is Our Henry, taking such a cheap and easy and deeply humbug way out of avoiding what's been happening in Gaza ...

What a relief to turn to Horsey, celebrating that famous ghetto Portland ...littered with dangerous radicals of the frog and unicorn kind ...