In which Polonius contrives to ruin the pond's meditative Sunday, while the dog botherer and the Angelic one are no help either ...

 

(Images from the Graudian coverage, though the Beast also has a goodly number of snaps - *archive link)

And that's the last time you'll be titillated in this meditative Sunday outing.

The pond couldn't believe its bad luck.

At least "Ned" could be safely tucked down at the bottom of the page where nobody would notice his deranged meandering, fit of nostalgia about a long forgotten head prefect who made a name for himself regularly spanking the country.

But ever since the pond gave up on the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans, Polonial prattle has always been the starting point for a vigorous debate, designed to inspire the shaking of canes and the rattling of wheelchairs.

And yet, to prove lightning does indeed strike twice at the very same spot, what did Polonius get up to this weekend?

He doubled down on "Ned". 

He decided to soil Sunday with another serve of ancient squatter from Nareen stuff ...

The header: Malcolm Fraser’s long road from right to left; The man who blocked supply to bring down Gough Whitlam spent decades seeking redemption from the very people who once despised him – but at what cost to historical truth?

The caption: Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam join forces to record a Yes-case television ad for the 1999 republic referendum.

The pond supposes it's only 4 minutes, not like the unendurable 11 minutes spent with "Ned's" natter ... but the pond felt an incredible desire to do a Tootle ...

How is it, for example, that somehow the likes of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and above all, snakes of the Dershowitz and Bannon kind have managed to escape the heat?

The pond can understand Woody Allen - he directed Manhattan and that's all you need to know. He no longer has a reputation that anyone could sully or slander.

But how do some of these snakes manage to slither away unnoticed, unless they happen to turn up in a Borat movie, featured in a most unseemly light?

Sorry, sorry, Tootle has returned to the tracks.

On with official reptile duties ... take it away Polonius:

I’m often asked about the metamorphosis of Malcolm Fraser, who was first elected prime minister of Australia 50 years ago today, the 13th.

Hang on, hang on, hold it right there.

He's often asked? 

Who mingles with this ossified dinosaur? 

Even worse, who often asks him what it was like in Antediluvian times?

Or is it just a cheap, stale, rhetorical device to allow him to get into blathering about the head prefect?

Speaking of cheap rhetorical devices, what a good way to return to the blather:

When I was a student at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s, Fraser occasionally gave talks at the campus. He was one of the few Coalition MPs who could defend Australia’s Vietnam commitment, along with conscription, in an intelligent manner.

Oh indeed, indeed, though the halls still resound with talk of the way that Polonius ignored the bounce of the marble and signed up to serve Her Majesty, bringing western civilisation to the Vietnamese with his warrior ways.

The pond keeds, the pond keeds ... Polonius valiantly fought the war from the rear and paid dearly for his devotion to the cause ... (sorry, from June 2005, behind the Crikey paywall)

(Relax Melburnians, thanks to the Graudian, the pond is aware that allegedly leftie Melbourne has kept the traditional Xmas shop window display alive, while godless Sydney has abandoned it for branding opportunities).

Oh 'Nam valiant warrior, oh noble fighter, and yet the pond's attempt at deflection and distraction won't work.

We're stuck with Polonius going on and on about the head prefect ...

Fraser was a fierce opponent of the Labor Party, not only members of the Labor Left such as Jim Cairns but also right-wing Labor types such as Gough Whitlam. Fraser admired Robert Menzies and sought to defend his legacy. Yet in the lead-up to his death in 2015, Fraser was loved by the left.
In his later years Fraser co-wrote two books with left-of-centre journalists/academics. In his 2010 Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, which he co-wrote with Margaret Simons, it was reported that at literary festivals in the 2000s Fraser “was applauded by the same kinds of people who had once reviled him for his role in the dismissal of Whitlam”.
Then in Dangerous Allies, which Fraser wrote with Cain Roberts in 2014, he stated that from around 1945 Menzies “misjudged the direction in which the world was heading”. By then he was attacking the Menzies legacy and had quit the Liberal Party.
Why the change? In my view, Fraser wanted to be loved – including by the left. As is widely known, in October-November 1975 a talented, arrogant and stubborn man (Fraser) was determined to block supply in the Senate. And a talented, arrogant and stubborn man (Whitlam) was determined to govern without supply.

The reptiles slipped in a reference to that cur Kerr, Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser during a Parliament House lunch in 1977. Picture: Brett Thomson

No doubt the reptiles were hoping that the pond would be inspired to turn once again to the currish Kerr drunk at the Tamworth show - one of the few bright moments for a town ruined by Barnaby - or even drunk at the Melbourne cup.

But the pond has been there too often in recent times, and pressed on:

Governor-General Sir John Kerr resolved the deadlock by dismissing Whitlam, who would not advise of a double-dissolution election, and appointing Fraser as caretaker prime minister pending a double-dissolution election. In the event, on December 13, 1975, the Coalition won in a landslide.
As someone who worked for a minister in the Fraser government between 1976 and 1979 it was evident to me that Fraser was unnerved by the opposition to the way he became prime minister. At the time there were angry demonstrations against him and Kerr. One of the latter is covered by Gary Newman’s 2023 documentary How to Capture a Prime Minister, dealing with the violent anti-Fraser demonstration at Monash University in 1976.
Fraser led a relatively successful government from late 1975 until early 1980 but it ran out of steam. Sure, the international economy was not in good shape. But the main problem was that Fraser did not have an economic agenda.

The reptiles slipped in another snap ... Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser at the launch of the Australia's First Century book in 2000.

At this point Polonius took an exceedingly dull turn, spending an elaborate amount of time establishing the basis for a feud with Ancient Troy ... as if the sight of two reptiles battling over the head prefect made for a spectacle more entertaining than Gladiator ...

Fraser retired from politics in early 1983 and in 1987 Malcolm Fraser: A Biography was published. Fraser fed material to author Philip Ayres that was hostile to John Howard and Kerr. Fraser claimed for the first time – a decade after the Dismissal – that in a phone call at about 9.55am on November 11, 1975, Kerr had tipped him off that he was about to dismiss Whitlam after finding out that the opposition was still intent on blocking supply.
Kerr denied this and had a note, dated November 16, 1975, to support his position along with an account in his 1978 book Matters for Judgement. Kerr said Fraser’s note was written at Government House after Whitlam had been dismissed.
What Fraser told Ayres in 1987 was based on his memory. He said he had handwritten a note of his phone conversation, on which he recorded four conditions Kerr had laid down for him to become a caretaker prime minister.
The note apparently was not recovered until the early 2000s. In fact, Kerr laid down six conditions, not four. The note was first published in The Political Memoirs in 2010. It was obvious that the handwriting at the top of the note was dramatically different from the signature, date and time at the bottom of the note.
Also the signature seems to begin with a capital “J” followed by a capital “M”. Bear in mind that Fraser’s full name was John Malcolm Fraser. Moreover, in November 1975 he used to sign his name as “Malcolm Fraser”. In addition, the date “11 Nov 1975” had the “7” transcribed over an “8”.

The reptiles flung in yet another snap of the head prefect and Gough ... Then prime minister Malcolm Fraser and opposition leader Gough Whitlam at the opening of a new BHP steel mill at Geelong in 1977. Picture: NCA

And then it was time for all that carefully cultivated pedantry to pay off with a direct assault on Ancient Troy ...

In his article in these pages on December 8, Troy Bramston wrote that “the claim that the note was made later cannot be substantiated and was rather silly”.
My claim was only that the date, time and signature had been inserted later. But Fraser and Simons declined to explain the difference in the writing. The issue is also addressed in an article by Michael Connor in the September 2017 issue of Quadrant – which is anything but “silly”.
I demonstrated the difference in writing during my appearance on the Sky News documentary The Dismissal: 50 Years On and in my recent book Malcolm Fraser: A Personal Reflection. No one has challenged my analysis by means of considered argument.
There is another problem. To believe Fraser’s account over Kerr’s, one has to rely on Fraser’s memory. Yet Fraser wrote in The Political Memoirs that his memory was “notoriously fallible”.

Did the pond give two hoots, or even a single hoot?

It was so Polonius ... it's been that way since well before 2008 and this First Dog note ...

The only thing the pond cared about was the way that the reptiles refused to give Reg Withers proper respect ... Former Liberal minister Reg Withers.

Please, he was the toe cutter. He was such a b*stard of an enforcer, that the only name that suited him was taken from a Sydney gang that would cut off the toes of their victims ...

Now if the reptiles had slipped that in, there might have been some entertainment, and Polonius might not have whimpered off into a final gobbet of tedium ...

Bramston writes that the alleged Kerr-Fraser call was witnessed by one-time Liberal MPs Reg Withers and Vic Garland. He makes no reference to Bob Ellicott QC, who told me that he was in the room and the call was too brief for Kerr to have laid down six conditions.
The problem with memory is that some people have clear “recollections” of events that never happened. Fallible memories, in other words. Whatever the motivation, Fraser’s claim that he was effectively tipped off by Kerr put the focus of the Dismissal on Kerr and away from Fraser. This paved the way for Fraser to become besties with Whitlam.
Meanwhile, Fraser left notes in his personal papers criticising Kerr for the way he handled the Dismissal – views he never expressed a half-century ago. In the end, Fraser was loved by the left but many of his one-time closest supporters believed he had lost his way.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Once again the pond will provide a belated intermittent archive link to the musings of Polonius.

Why? Because masochists might not have had their fill, and they might want to wander through the hive mind - links usually do a Hotel California, and once inside you can never leave.

The last par for example had a link to this, and who wouldn't want to keep flogging their backs, Percy Grainger style, preferably with a good birch or pine branch?

The upside? Not a single mention of the ABC! It must be the Xmas silly season.

And so to the dog botherer, doing his best to ruin Xmas seasonal cheer with a whining, moaning, litany, a mournful dirge of divisive unhappiness ...

The header: ‘Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime’;  We’ve lost cohesion and character as protesters intimidate fellow citizens and government fuels division.

Says the most divisive rag for the most divisive foreign corporation at work in the country.

The caption: Protesters block shipping in Newcastle last month. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The upside? It's apparently the dog botherer's last column for the year.

The downside? It's a dog botherer column, one of his usual divisive efforts spraying around words like "zealot" ...

Only a narcissist of the first water wouldn't notice the abundant ironies ...

We are losing parts of our national character and this is weakening our nation. While this may be an inevitable and unsurprising consequence of globalisation, the digital media age, record immigration and multiculturalism, it is still troubling to witness, and we have the option of resisting.
Casting my mind over 2025 for my final column of the year, there is an overwhelming sense that the nation has changed or that differences long in the making have started to become more perceptible. Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime.
Citizens have paraded behind posters of terrorist leaders to intimidate fellow citizens. Jewish people have repeatedly faced public death threats and their communities have been attacked and vandalised, a synagogue and childcare centre firebombed.
Climate zealots have blocked cars, trains and ships, preventing their fellow citizens from going about their lawful business. Activists routinely and selfishly place their obsessions above the interests of law-abiding compatriots – and too often authorities protect the rights of protesters over those of others exercising their day-to-day freedoms.

As usual, it's not the actual observed explosion of extreme weather events, their consequent impact on insurance, on property and people, and on the planet, that's the problem, it's the way that uppity people insist on mentioning them ... The explosion of extreme weather mentions fans fear in the politics of climate.

Can you have alarmist alarm about alarmists being alarmed?

You can, at least in irony-free dog botherer world ...

Our governments and authorities deliberately fuel alarmism over global warming and mislead the population about our national energy self-harm. Regional communities are divided into the haves and have-nots as renewable energy and transmission projects cut through their landscapes.
More than half of all voters now rely on government for most of their income. A report by the Centre for Independent Studies calculated those directly employed by government, getting most of their income from welfare benefits or working in jobs reliant on government funding top 50 per cent of the adult population – consider what that means for the economy, politics and individual initiative.
Large numbers of people look to government to solve any manner of ills. Media exacerbates these expectations and politicians oblige with ever more intrusions.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme has blown out to become a $50bn a year behemoth, where taxpayers’ money is rorted by service providers who drain the market economy of workers and productivity.
The parties of government are receiving fewer votes than ever and the parties of protest are winning an increasing share.

Meanwhile, the dog bothering was lathering up a fit about the flag ... Protestors burning Australian flag

Look at it positively, all they're doing is burning the UK flag, plus a few stars that have been dragged into the mix ...

The pond doesn't much mind what anyone does to the UK flag:

Our national flag is shunned by many, and when it is flown it is usually accompanied by not one but two Indigenous flags. Welcomes to country are overdone and often sound anything but welcoming, morphing into grievance and admonishment.
What has happened to a frontier nation once ingrained with self-reliance and adaptability? What have we done to an economy once endowed with plentiful, cheap energy?
Where is our common purpose and cohesion? What do we rally around? And what do we share (apart from a government debt that has reached $1 trillion)?
Most of this has unfolded on a continuum, and some government overreach was exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social divisions and protest movements have been animated by the war in Gaza and inflamed by social media.
We are living in a rapidly changing world and it is inevitable that Australia will change too. But a wise nation would look to retain strong qualities that have held it in good stead, while nourishing clear values and shared ambitions.
When tens of thousands of people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in August it was celebrated by many politicians and much of the media as a mainstream movement for the Palestinian people and peace. No doubt there were well-intentioned people who joined in, probably misinformed by social media, the ABC and others.

It being the Australian Daily Zionist News, it wasn't long before the dog botherer went there, Zionist Federation of Australia CEO Alon Cassuto says the Jewish community is “shaken up” after seeing the “glorification of terrorism” from the pro-Palestine protest on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. “This so-called march for humanity, which was promoted as a peaceful demonstration, was anything but,” Mr Cassuto told Sky News host Steve Price. “These images are not about peace. “If these people wanted peace, then they‘d stand side-by-side with Jews and Palestinians. “This was a march against Israel … this was not a march for peace.”

Whenever that happens, the pond likes to nip off to Haaretz to check on what's really happening ...

Sure enough ...

'Israel Is Pushing Us Out': Plan to Open Gaza's Rafah Crossing Leaves Palestinians With More Questions Than Answers (*archive link)

And ...

'You'll Pay in Blood': Israeli Journalist Who Exposed IDF Abuse of Palestinian Detainee Speaks Out Amid Death Threats
Israel's Channel 12 News journalist Guy Peleg faces escalating threats and harassment since he published a video - handed over to him by the former Military Advocate General - of the extreme abuse at Sde Teiman (*archive link)

Oh and stories like this ...

But the dog botherer has never been big on noticing ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, mass destruction and mass starvation as a war strategy (and crime):

The protest was organised by the radical Palestine Action Group, which has close links with operatives in Socialist Alternative and Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is banned in many countries, including in the Muslim world). It was a march of hatred, not peace.
Protesters displayed terrorist banners and a poster of the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, a sponsor of global terrorism against Israelis and a country that has launched drones and fired missiles in pursuit of its stated aim of wiping Israel off the map. Iran was behind the arson attack on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue last year.
Marchers also chanted slogans about the elimination of Israel (“From the river to the sea”) and the killing of Israeli soldiers (“death to the IDF”). Among the pro-Palestinian crowd was Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun who fronted a cheering crowd at Sydney’s Lakemba on October 8, 2023, expressing elation, happiness and pride at the October 7 atrocities.
At the bridge protest Dadoun said he was “marching for humanity”. Sure.
This was an ominous episode for this country; it amounted to an Islamist-dominated threat against Israel, its supporters and Australians who are Jewish. It came almost two years after the Lakemba celebration of October 2023 and the Sydney Opera House protest and threats against Jews the following night – there have been almost weekly anti-Israel street marches in Sydney and Melbourne since.
Pro-Palestinian groups also made intimidating sorties into suburbs with high Jewish populations. The bridge march was the culmination of this ugliness, yet it was embraced by Hamas’s useful idiots in our political and media class.

These litanies never seem to end, what with the many grudges served up again and again ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a press conference in Canberra in August, where he announced Australia would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh / AFP

There's a reason that the Oxford made "rage bait" the word of the year, even if it's two words, but they got the definition wrong ...

(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.

What they should have included was "tired old hacks wanting to sh*t stir and send hive minds into a buzzing, hysterical frenzy at the lizard Oz".

But at least the pond has made mention of it, as the rage baiter continued with his baiting and his hating ...

Based partly on the strength of the Harbour Bridge turnout and cynical electoral concerns (Muslim voters outnumber Jews 10 to one), Anthony Albanese formally recognised the non-existent state of Palestine the following month at the UN. A steadfast supporter of Israel since its modern reincarnation in 1948, Australia under Albanese abandoned a mate, the only pluralist democracy in the Middle East, a country under attack on all fronts. It is impossible to watch all this unfold and fail to realise that something fundamental has changed in our country.
From the Prime Minister down, our governments and authorities have failed the Jewish population and Israel while bending to the wishes of hardline Islamist groups whose fundamentalist views are anathema to our central values of democracy, tolerance and pluralism. Rather than take lessons from what has been unfolding in Europe and Britain, our government has taken itself to the top of the list of countries welcoming refugees from the terrorist badlands of Gaza. Security checks for about 3000 visas could have been only cursory.
With a population topping 500,000 people, the city of Newcastle in NSW is the seventh largest in the nation and has a proud history. Its economic fortunes have always been linked to the coal industry and it remains the world’s largest coal exporting port. Last month climate activists including Greens leader Larissa Waters kayaked and swam in the channel in a deliberate and successful attempt to disrupt shipping, just as they have previously blocked rail lines and loading operations.

Coal, coal, coal, always the coal, and images designed to shock, disturb and provoke anger, Rising Tide protester on Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

All that did was take the pond way back to the days of the 'Nam moratoriums, when many shared Muhammad Ali's view that he ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ...

Whenever you get the dog botherer ranting about moral narcissism, arrogance, selfishness and the like, remember, it's just a form of projection ...

He embodies all the unsavoury qualities he allegedly finds in others ...

Apart from interrupting coal exports the protesters dissuaded a cruise liner scheduled to bring 1000 tourists into the city. The arrogance and selfishness of these protesters is astonishing. To indulge their activism, they choose to prevent fellow citizens from working or plying extra trade in their small businesses – hardly a fair go.
We have seen years of moral vanity from the left, imposing their will and ducking intelligent debate on the basis that alternative views are morally bankrupt – it is all about white hats denouncing black hats. This has mutated into a moral narcissism, where the left is so infatuated with its own virtue that it has only visceral hatred for those who disagree with it.

Gone is any pretence that the dog botherer cared about the Voice ...

This has poisoned discussions about Indigenous affairs so that the Indigenous voice proposal, designed to bring the country together, only deepened a chasm. There is a post-referendum harshness now, where activists make wild demands and opponents pretend rejection of the voice means there is no ground to give and no problem to fix – the mainstream consensus around practical reconciliation has been trashed.
We are on a dismal trajectory. Just five years ago, soon before he died, the great British-born Jewish philosopher Jonathan Sacks was prescient in his brilliant book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.
“If we focus on the ‘I’ and lose the ‘We’, if we act on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else,” Sacks wrote. “Nations will cease to have societies and instead have identity groups. We will lose our feeling of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood. In an age of unprecedented possibilities, people will feel vulnerable and alone.”

How far back does he go in this litany? 

In a column supposedly farewelling 2025, it's back 2023 ...Senator Lidia Thorpe (centre) takes part in a 2023 Invasion Day rally. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

And so to the final gobbet, and yes, "victimhood" is trotted out like a dose of diarrhea by someone who clearly thinks of himself as an eternal victim:

His diagnosis is global but applies here. Do you see vulnerability and competition for victimhood in Australia? Do you see a greater focus on identity groups rather than common values and goals?
Sachs was on to something. His prescription is to shift away from the transactional to the meaningful, from the individual to the communal. “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship.”
There is merit in this. But to my mind, knowledge is also key.
In so many of our volatile disputes, such as the Middle East, climate change, energy policy and even economics, ignorance and misinformation abound. New generations are informed by social media, which means they know little except their own prejudices, reaffirmed by algorithms feeding them what a computer thinks they want to hear. It is a digital inversion of our intellectual evolution, where the contest of ideas, scientific scepticism and consideration of alternatives have driven us forward.
Let us make a covenant for 2026 – in the new year and beyond we must fight strongly against this collective dumbing down. Thank you for reading, and thinking, and I wish you a peaceful Christmas. Rest up for the struggle ahead.

We must fight strongly against the collective dumbing down?

But that means the pond would have to give up recycling the wretched hate and hysteria peddled by the reptiles, currently being recycled into the ether by the pond, and worse still, being picked up by bots so that it can poison AI for an eternity ....

The pond keeps thinking about giving up its insidious addiction to the reptiles, as rotting to the mind as meth is to the body ... but not just yet.

As for another bonus, the pond will provide one link up front, to the latest Dame Slap ...

How firms are seduced into backing a radical agenda
Activist groups are quietly using public awards and brownie points to achieve radical change. It’s social engineering by stealth as corporations compete for virtue-signalling awards.

Here's a sample ...

Why did the pond flinch from going all the way with Dame Slap?

As soon as any reptile mentions "virtue-signalling" the pond sees it as a virtue to signal that it's out of there ...

But there was an even bigger irony, one that inevitably escaped the attention of this MAGA-cap donning mega prize maroon.

If there's a prize to rabbit on about endlessly, surely this past week's prize provided endless opportunities ...

But Dame Slap long ago lost the courage to go there. All she can do is rant at minorities, and so she can rant alone.

And so to the real bonus, the Angelic one's outing, with this a good way to prepare ...

Yes, the Angelic one had got her nickers in a knot about all sorts of wickedness, especially of the AI kind, even worse than Santa conspiring to foil social media ...

The header: Forget social media, AI is the real threat to kids – it steals their thinking, With students relying on ChatGPT to write assignments and even act as a friend, educators fear AI is blunting independent thought and blurring reality, posing risks far beyond those of social media.

The caption for the image: ChatGPT and other AI-generated tools such as Grok and Gemini can be a way into social media. Picture: AFP

And that image is exactly what's wrong with the reptiles at the moment ...a generic sameness that litters and ruins the rag, as it does the full to overflowing intertubes ...

Such a tired cheapening, such a waste of bandwidth.

The hapless Angelic one was up against it from the start ...

It is a familiar trope to bemoan the state of youth today. It has always been a source of mirth and despair.
Back in my pre-internet teaching days, when students were just pupils, we used to share examples of scholarly ignorance in the staff­room, like one 14-year-old’s imaginative essay about life in ancient Rome that began: “The Romans had great fun in the Circus Maximus, because they had the lions and tigers and clowns.”
Today, however, such harmless sources of entertainment for jaded teachers have been replaced by something more sinister; it is called ChatGPT.
It may surprise older readers to know that almost every high school kid and a good number of younger ones use ChatGPT. This is a harbinger of something much less obvious than the harm of social media. It is much more insidious and dangerous.
While the government has already thought about trying to plug the gaps in the social media ban by making it hard to access platforms such as Lemon8, fewer parents are worried about ChatGPT. Why ever not? One answer is that parents themselves are wedded to this seemingly harmless tool, just as they are to social media. Another is that they have not worked out that ChatGPT and other AI-generated tools such as Grok and Gemini can be a way into social media.

The pond isn't quite certain why the Angelic one is so agitated.

Recently Sam declared a code red ... per the WSJ ...

And others are flying close to the sun ... per Bloomberg ...

And some stuff still stays broken, per Wired, despite the ongoing attempts to fix the endlessly broken ...

Maybe we should be thinking about a crash as big as the Ritz...

Never mind, have a terrifying image, which doesn't happen to feature the extreme far right of the lizard Oz, Australia has banned young teenagers from social media sites such as Instagram. Picture: AFP.

The Angelic one was in a luddite frenzy, and the pond wondered whether she'd smashed up her keyboard, scribbled her copy in long hand, and used a carrier pigeon to send it to head office ...

One teacher of my acquaintance told me that a student had told her they would just use Chat to get around the social media ban. However, there is another more prevalent danger of this “harmless” tool. It leads almost inevitably to a stultifying effect on the ability of the young to think for themselves and it renders them almost incapable of abstract thinking.
One reason for this is that many school and university students use ChatGPT not simply to glean information but to write any long-form response.
If you speak to a high school teacher now, as I recently did, they will tell you how unrelentingly uniform are all their answers to anything, especially take-home history and English assignments, because of the ubiquity of ChatGPT. It has even replaced Google because it will actually write assignments for them, and some students don’t even bother changing it a bit.
High school students no longer just copy passages from texts, which I confess to doing as an undergraduate myself. In the past, students had to know where to look, to find the right texts and the right passages of the texts. Chat and other forms of AI relieve the weary adolescent of this burdensome task. One teacher told me that some don’t even bother cutting off the words “is there anything else you would like to know?” – an amusing giveaway.
In short, ChatGPT and other forms of AI have relieved them of the burden of thinking. Most students cannot see what is wrong with this. If a teacher fails them for doing it, they will invariably respond: “It’s right, isn’t it?” That’s because to them, as strangers to thoughtful interpretation of texts, something is “right” or “wrong”, and more often than not their parents will show up to complain. After all, their parents have been using Chat for everything.
This is the nub of the whole problem of using social media and the more sophisticated tools of AI. Parents are as wedded to this stuff as kids. This is not something that passing a law can fix. When I see a mother walking down the street pushing the baby’s stroller with one hand and scrolling through her social media with the other one I cannot help wondering how that baby is supposed to grow up social media and bot free, then like magic suddenly turn into a responsible adolescent at 16.

There came a last terrifying image... The social media ban began on Wednesday. Picture: AFP.

The Angelic one decided the way to destroy her credibility was to end her final gobbet on a Haidt note, as if the pond hasn't already had enough reptile hate speech today ...

There is another, worse, danger. ChatGPT and other chatbots, which are becoming ever more sophisticated, can be used to replace human communication altogether. They can adopt a personality and in long exchanges seem almost human.
There has been a notorious case in the US alleging ChatGPT encouraged Adam Raine, an introverted 16-year-old, to take his own life. This poor boy used ChatGPT as a substitute for human companionship. It is alleged to have encouraged his delusion, helped him to explore methods of suicide and even helped him write a note, left in the computer. His parents knew nothing about it. As his father said, “Most parents do not know the capability of this tool.”
The inability to disentangle AI from reality is the most obvious danger for the young into the future, even if a parent is complacent about their child’s psychological stability and ability to tell real from counterfeit in a Chat conversation
One student told my teacher acquaintance that he calls the bot by name, and it calls him by name too. In fact, ordinary social media communication might be less harmful to a kid than replacing it with a bot. After all, ordinary social media, whether it is Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, means that young people are communicating with other young humans – for good or ill. If they are bullied then they or their parents can deal in person with the problem.
Despite all the nay-saying and the thorough research from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, communication through social media may be less dangerous than what will replace it. As the student who communicates with the bot by name told his teacher, at least with social media “there is a person”.

At least there is a person?

The entire point of social media is to substitute the person with the algorithm, or at least to make any interaction the stuff of data-crunching, money-making algorithms ...

The pond found it irresistible to ask a bot what it thought were the limitations of Haidt speech, and this is what came up ...

Oh well the pond cares not a whit nor a jot for Haidt speech or for bots trying to sound human.

It did however round out a truly wasted Sunday, as often happens when in the company of the dismal reptiles.

At least the pond could turn to Tom the Dancing Bug for reassurance that all was well in Dame Slap's disunited states ...

As a final bonus, Simon Marks doing his bleak American week ...