In which the pond ducks, dodges and weaves but still gets lumbered with the bromancer and Dame Slap ...

 

For light relief, the pond likes to look to tales emanating from little England.

After producing an empire that blighted large swathes of the planet, it now seems in terminal decline.

In such a situation, many countries turn to con artists and grifters for an instant solution.

The United States has already gone there with a mad king, and little England has been thinking about it, with Nigel busy making plans (okay, agreed, a country that boasts a populist Pauline can't be taking cheap shots).

Once you have a loon getting ready to take the reins, you have columnists ready to have fun.

A dose of cracking Crace or a marinating Hydeing, and the pond feels quite cheerful and ready to face an ominous world, or even worse, solemn herpetology studies.

Throw in a few cartoons, and the pond can cope with its daily descent into the hive mind.

It's true that the United States offers the same opportunities, what with the pond having to keep up with the many nicknames that have been given to Pete Hegseth, from Colonel Vodka to No Tab Pete to Kegsbreath to Dumb McNamara. (Reddit)

No Tab Pete has become infamous for his purges, and waddya know, the very same word bobbed up this day in the lizard Oz.

Following Our Henry's effort yesterday deploring Maoism, the bromancer followed up with a belated revival of his war with China ...

The header: Take Xi Jinping at his word: communist true believer, admires Mao and Stalin; Australia’s failure to grasp the CCP’s totalitarian nature leaves the nation dangerously exposed.

The caption for the snap of a diabolical fiend designed to send the bromancer into a frenzy: Chinese President Xi Jinping has overseen sweeping purges within the Central Military Commission and the CCP. Picture: AP

Some might wonder at this "fear the Commies" reptile vibe, but the pond thinks it's simple enough.

First, it's like a murmuration of starlings in the hive mind. One reptile mentions Mao, another reptile is plunged back into the 1950s (likely many of them never left it, except to blather about dominoes and how they won the war in 'Nam). 

Second, the United States is in a comprehensive mess, no thanks in large part to the company for which the bromancer hacks, so as a distraction the best solution is to have a fit of hysteria and a panic attack about the Chinese coming south.

This places the pond in a delicious situation.

There's no need to defend Xi or the Communist regime, what with the pond suspecting it wouldn't last five minutes as a blogger in Xi's world.

But there's also nothing like watching the bromancer have a five minute meltdown ...

The People’s Republic of China is the chief strategic, military and political danger to Australia. Yet Australians know less about the Chinese government today than at any time since the first years of communist rule in the early 1950s. One straw in the wind: recent polls show our population is less likely to see China as a threat than many other Asian populations are.
How can this be?
This week Beijing ruthlessly threw its weight around at the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, keeping several leaders away, railing against Taiwan’s presence and limiting PIF’s protest against Beijing’s intimidatory, ballistic missile firing near Tuvalu.
We had the rare, welcome spectacle of Anthony Albanese publicly criticising China. An infinitely bigger story unfolded in Beijing, all but unremarked. Xi Jinping purged two of China’s most senior generals – Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. This is astonishing. Zhang was the most senior Chinese in uniform, second only in military power to Xi himself. His dismissal from the Central Military Commission leaves it with only two members, Xi and one soldier.

Ah, the purge ... General Zhang Youxia arrives for a group photo before the opening ceremony of the 19th Western Pacific Naval Symposium in Qingdao in 2024. Picture: Wang Zhao / AFP

More purging will follow ...as the bromancer's hopes for his war with China surged ...

Zhang was a politburo member. His sacking marks the first time since Mao Zedong and all his madness that three politburo members were purged within one five-year term. It reeks of brittleness and instability. Zhang and Liu are accused of “corruption”, like almost all the hundreds of officials condemned under Xi, who has purged dozens of generals in the past four years.
Corruption is now an all-purpose offence, as ideological deviationism was in the old Cold War days. It’s dangerous for Australians to understand so little about Chinese government. Why this ignorance? Partly it’s Beijing’s design. There are only 30-odd foreign correspondents left in China, to cover 1.4 billion people.
More fundamentally, the way we conceive of China omits the single most important dynamic in its state apparatus. Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department, interprets the military sackings as likely reflecting Xi’s wish to find generals who will furnish him a war-winning plan to take Taiwan by force.
Mike Green of the US Studies Centre, who was the senior Asia official under George W. Bush, thinks some sacked generals were possibly those urging caution on Xi over Taiwan. Both Pezzullo and Green readily admit other possibilities.
Analysts miss the secret in plain sight, because it’s too ugly and too recondite. That is the internal culture of the Chinese Communist Party, which is addicted to purges as a central method of operation.
There are different ways of conceiving of China. Henry Kissinger was a structural realist who wanted to fit China into a concert of great powers. So-called realists tend to underplay ideology, values and the agency of individual leaders.
Others such as Paul Keating can never bring themselves to criticise China at all. They are perhaps overwhelmed by the scale and goodies China offers. There’s a name for this recent trend – Chinamaxxing. Actually it’s an old trend. When I was a correspondent in Beijing in 1985, industrialist Peter Abeles visited and judged that China would become a more purely capitalist society than any in the West. Abeles was formidable, but that was utterly fatuous – China derangement.

It's wonderful how the deranged fling around words like "China derangement", especially as it seems to have escaped the bromancer that China has indeed become a formidable capitalist society, almost the perfect expression of relentless materialism, serving consumerism around the world (the pond is loving its Geely EV)... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently criticised Beijing’s pressure tactics at the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau. Picture: Jason Edwards / NewsWire

The derangement continued apace ...

Others overwhelmed by China’s scale, such as Hugh White, think Beijing must eventually dominate the region, so we should make our peace. Still others attribute everything in modern China to the continuity and inscrutability of Chinese traditional culture.
My own view of China was heavily influenced by three men, the great Belgian-Australian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (who often wrote as Simon Leys) and two whose university theses he supervised, Geremie Barme and Kevin Rudd. Both Barme and Rudd dedicated their major works to Ryckmans.
All three emphasised interrogating the distinctive culture of communism, which flourishes in Xi’s mind and throughout the CCP. Ryckmans began as a scholar of art. He visited China, fell in love with its culture and became perhaps the greatest Sinologist of the 20th century. He operated with unique genius at that “bloody crossroads” where culture and politics meet.
A profound Christian humanist, Ryckmans wept over the assault on traditional Chinese culture mounted by communist vandalism. One of his earliest books, Chinese Shadows, written in the 1970s, is a prolonged scream of pain at the communist desecration of Chinese culture. He wrote of “a regime for which beauty in all forms appears to be the sure mark of feudal vice or bourgeois corruption”.
He lived for a time in Hong Kong and interviewed streams of refugees from the mainland. He read everything the Beijing government said about itself. He also read east European anti-communist dissidents and unexpectedly learnt there much about communism that applied to China. And of course he was a great scholar of Chinese literature, language and history, later producing a magnificent translation of the Analects of Confucius.

As it so happens, the pond's current toilet reading is the ancient Cambridge Illustrated History of China (by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, 1999), which makes a nonsense of talk of "traditional Chinese culture."

Every time a new Son of Heaven turns up, there's vast dislocations or attempts to sort out the vast dislocations, with the Han struggling for dominance.

The pond lost track of the inumberable feuds somewhere around the Tang dynasty, and it's not that much different with the latest emperor ... China scholar, critic and novelist Pierre Ryckmans, pictured at home in Canberra in 2009.

Whatever might be said about the last Emperor of China, and the Qing dynasty, it was rotten to the core, and ripe for replacement, and much the same could be said of the degradation of Sun Yat-sen's party into the corrupt world of Chiang Kai-shek (if you want traditional culture, the pond was delighted to experience both the Chongqing residence and the Nanjing mansion where Chiang ran his rackets and entertained his mistresses, as many dissident emperors had done before him).

There's nothing much different with the new Chinese emperor, save for Xi's abstemious presentation in public life.
I interviewed and talked with Ryckmans as often as I could and read his books. He may be the most erudite man, and the most profound thinker, I ever knew.
He brilliantly decoded communist blather and outright lies. His successor as a Sinologist is the also brilliant Barme. Like Ryckmans for many years a professor at the Australian National University, Barme now runs the splendid China Heritage website.
Barme has often told me how profoundly influenced the CCP was by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and especially by Joseph Stalin, one of the most brutal dictators the world has known. Barme classifies China’s regime today as “Stalino-Maoist-nationalism”.
This communist culture is strong and tenacious, less Marxist than it was but a fully formed, living, deeply held, communist totalitarian belief system. In a profound essay called We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again (which Barme published in a series titled Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium), Barme wrote: “Today as China and Russia in their disparate ways challenge and white-ant the post-World War II world order, their political lives, imaginaries and motivations continue to reflect a totalitarian temper with century-old roots.”

Boosting Putin is quite silly, given that the current Russian empire has spent WWII time trying to subdue Ukraine, and failing dismally at the task ...and who knows if Xi will embark on a Taiwan folly and try to match him, though he could probably count on the mad king doing nothing, or perhaps assisting him in his special military operation.

For those who wondered how No Tab Pete's purges related to the bromancer's sorry tale, relax, here it comes:

Barme tells me that the purge, the continual, endless purge, is central to a certain type of communist political management. The so-called dialectic of the purge was the way both Stalin and Mao managed communist politics. Everyone except the infallible and glorious leader is constantly off balance, never knowing when or even how they might slip up in a fatal way.

What, like this?

An emperor's purge is different to the United Sates in what way? What with the likes of the mad King and Pete, and Faux Noise acting as state media celebrating the purges, and the bromancer in the same purging empire?

Never mind ...

Rudd, as I’ve remarked before, has written a truly monumental work, On Xi Jinping, certainly the most instructive Australian book on contemporary China. He quotes Xi trenchantly and repeatedly defending Stalin, Lenin and Mao. For example, Xi wrote: “To dismiss Lenin and Stalin … is to engage in historic nihilism.”

There came a final snap featuring former chairman Rudd ... Xi Jinping and Kevin Rudd in Canberra in 2010. Picture: AP

In all, it's an epic way for the bromancer to avoid the current madness gripping the United States, a madness that might yet produce a world-wide economic crisis, not to mention demolition by way of climate change. Best to stay tilting at Chinese windmills, and stay shtum about the Iran folly  ...

Among many acute insights into Xi, Rudd writes: “The objective facts of Chinese and world history are actually far less relevant to understanding Xi’s world view than his own subjective analysis and the official histories of the CCP that he relies on.” Xi is a believing communist ideologue.
China under Xi, Rudd argues, believes its Marxism is universal and it offers, almost idealistically, an alternative authoritarian development model.
I first met Rudd in Beijing in 1985 when the Australian ambassador of the day tasked him with briefing me on human rights. These three men – Ryckmans, Barme and Rudd – all loved China and were aghast at some of what the CCP has done to Chinese people (which is not, assuredly, to attribute to them identical views, still less to claim fraudulently that any would endorse everything I’ve written about China).
The other great source of knowledge about contemporary China is the Chinese diaspora, but many of its cleverest people are intimidated into silence by the power of the Chinese state.
Nonetheless many, like Ryckmans, Barme and Rudd, understand the most fundamental truth of modern China. You cannot understand anything about it unless you study the CCP and its distinctive communist culture. Not a pretty subject, to be sure, but it ought to be compulsory. For guess what – communist China is, after all, communist.

And tykes are tykes, and there are many fundamental truths out and about ...

At some point the pond usually provides a guide to what's tormenting the reptiles at the top of the "news" page.

This day it was standard Australian Daily Zionist News business ...

Not for the pond ...

ANTISEMITISM NORMALISED
Leaders ignored my terror warnings: ASIO chief
Mike Burgess has revealed his frustration and regret that his repeated warnings about antisemitism were underestimated.
By Sharri Markson.

Sharri? Has she returned to being a lizard Oz regular?

Full disrespect, the pond blinked, neigh blanched, at the prospect of featuring Sharri.

The pond guesses it will have to tackle Sharri some day, but not today. 

The pond also blinked at the notion of dealing with 11 minutes of "Ned" nattering away ...

Here's a link for those who want to get stuck in immediately, as diligent herpetology students would do ...

Nation eyes contest dominated by a clash between Albanese’s Labor and Hanson’s One Nation

The pond can eye "Ned" on the morrow, what with Sunday being the day when insomniacs need a good morning rest.

And the pond won't bother at all about a toad from the deep north turning up ...

Six steps to beat One Nation and restore public trust
Two One Nation by-election wins have rattled politics. Opponents hand Pauline Hanson her greatest weapon by attacking her rather than governing competently.
By Peter Beattie

Nor could the pond find the heart or the time to deal with snappy Tom...doing a standard reptile "bash the furriners" routine ...

A few quiet tweaks to immigration won’t win back hearts and minds
The starting point for leaders, amid toxic politics and government inaction, should be a clear statement on a common goal: to make the lives of Australians better.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Some might think that this would leave the pond short, but there's a never-ending supply of reptiles, and for once the pond plucked up the courage to ascend into Dame Slap's world up above the magic faraway tree.

The header: Left won the culture war – and fuelled One Nation’s rise; A ‘Deliverance’ moment in a Canadian gun shop hits close to home in Australia, where left-wing dominance has crushed the political middle into a dumbbell of extremes.

The caption for a snap from the movie, and never mind that Jon Voight later wandered off into cloud cuckoo land ... Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight in a scene from Deliverance. Picture: Getty Images

The pond will pass over the risible notion that the left fuelled Gina's pampered pet. She has, after all, taken on all the ideological positions of the lizard Oz, from bashing furriners to denying climate science.

Suffice to say, Dame Slap is as mad as a march hare, and the pond usually avoids her, what with familiarity breeding contempt, but she started with a movie reference and a travelogue, so the pond plunged in ...

Perhaps my Deliverance moment had come. I was standing in line in the hunting, fishing and shooting section of the Canadian Tire Store in Vernon, British Columbia. Ahead of me were two bearded men in their 30s who looked for all the world like the Canadian equivalent of the backwoodsmen from the movie Deliverance.
They were having an animated discussion about the best kind of rifle bolts with the giant bull-necked bald man supervising the hunting, fishing and shooting section. My reason for being there was less colourful, though no less important. You don’t go hiking the BC mountains in summer without bear mace, which is kept under lock and key in stores like this.
So, I patiently waited for personal attention from the fearsome-looking ex-marine type behind the counter.
The two Deliverance blokes came and went. Next in the queue was an equally rural white male who wanted advice on the best gun to shoot rats. Rat bait, it seems, is banned but feel free to shoot the rodents.
One learns many things in the queue at this most Canadian of stores, which sells much more than tires. Here’s what else I learned. I had misjudged the men ahead of me and the gruff store superviser. (sic) Not only were they polite, intelligent and humorous men but they illustrated the politically bipolar nature of not just Canada but Australia too.

How desperate did things get and how early?

The reptiles seized the chance to breakup Dame Slap's musings with a trailer for the film ...

Deliverance, for those who can barely remember this "squeal piggie" thriller was shot on the Chattooga River, bordering Georgia and South Caroline, and in Tallulah Gorge and Falls in Georgia and in South Carolin, and so has diddly squat to say or reveal about Canada.

She might just as easily stayed at home and referenced Wolf Creek. 

Back to the travelogue ...

A day earlier, I had left the spectacularly blessed but simultaneously self-cursed Vancouver. A city that is as physically beautiful as Sydney, wealthy, and yet horribly afflicted by well-meaning but disastrous social policies.
Blocks in the ritzy centre of Vancouver alternate between elegant, architecturally designed residential apartment buildings and shopfronts piled with drug addicts shooting up on the street.
Bears are not an issue in downtown Vancouver but drugged-out people are. There can be no better illustration of the practical impact of drug decriminalisation policies than Vancouver, and indeed other regional cities in BC beset by the province’s liberal tolerance of endless vape shops, cannabis supermarkets and the resulting anti-social behaviour.
The queue in the Canadian Tire hunting, fishing and shooting department represents a very different Canada from progressive Vancouver. These men – and no doubt the women in their lives – were easy for an ignorant outsider to typecast as rednecks.
But as I listened to them talk about their concerns in the queue, I realised these were down-to-earth Canadians who, if they lived in regional Australia or its outer suburbs, would be equally typecast and would no doubt vote One Nation in retaliation.
I love Canada and come here as often as I can. It is striking how similar, culturally and politically, this country is to Australia. Right now, both countries are going through a politically polarised period.

That's the problem with superficial people who think that a moment's presence in another country gives them unique insights into the inhabitants.

Right at the moment, confronted by the spectre of the mad king, Canadians are very much in elbows up mode, even in the orneriest province populated by Alberta separatists having to cope with the spectre ...

...US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a conservative news network in January: "I think we should let them come down into the US, and Alberta's a natural partner for the US."
And in June, the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation think tank published an article provocatively declaring "Canada's Texas is threatening divorce, and it could eventually become the 51st state".
More than 240,000 people have now put their name to a petition calling for the US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, to be declared "persona non grata".
The petition accuses Hoekstra of undermining US-Canada relations and normalising Trump's "51st state" taunts.
At a Forever Canadian event in the town of Diamond Valley, long-time Albertan Mary Papais echoed the fear on many people's minds.
"I believe that they are opening the gate for Donald Trump," she told the ABC.

Well yes, the Canucks are currently in an existential war with the mad king, but the reptiles doubled down with a snap that could have been taken in a city in any Australian or American state... (The pond has been re-watching The Wire, and really enjoys the views of Baltimore) Downtown Vancouver alternates between luxury apartment towers and shopfronts lined with people openly using drugs. Picture: Getty Images

These are the same reptiles who waged a war against safe injecting spaces, but never mind, moving along, and so to the core of Dame Slap's argument, arising from that superficial travelogue tour ...

Canada can simultaneously have an ultra-liberal progressive provincial government in BC yet a conservative government next door in fossil-fuel rich Alberta that is flirting with secession. Australia has the most ideologically left-wing federal government in modern history and a very strong Green and teal presence in its wealthy suburbs yet One Nation is everywhere on the march. Not too long ago both countries had population distributions whose political views roughly fitted a bell curve – small numbers at the left and right extremities with the vast majority clustered in the middle.
Now it seems the distribution of political belief in both countries looks more like a dumbbell – heavily weighted with dense numbers at the left and right ends with not much in the middle.
This redistribution of political belief has not yet hardened into concrete party affiliation or fixed voting patterns. Many are coming to realise their old parties don’t represent them any more and are starting to test out new homes – for example, One Nation – but it will take some time for the volatility in voting patterns to settle down.
In Australia, the distance between each end of the dumbbell and the passion of the opposing positions is illustrated by the Prime Minister’s reaction to One Nation’s win in the Secret Harbour by-election. This week Anthony Albanese rounded on right-wing populists “peddling dangerous, divisive and dishonest” politics. He said: “They will say anything and do anything to win votes. Bend any facts, peddle misinformation and disinformation. Turn Australian against Australian.”

Perhaps the reason Dame Slap went off this time is because back in the way she passed as a right wing populist, touring NSW to peddle denialist nonsense. 

At this point, the reptiles must have thought that Dame Slap was offering thin gruel, because they began slipping in AV distractions, beginning with the bog botherer and the swishing Switzer ...

​The Australian columnist Tom Switzer says One Nation’s triumph in the Secret Harbour by-election is "absolutely" a scare for Labor.​“It shows that Australia is playing catch-up with what’s happened in the United States 10 years ago, but also what’s happening all across the European continent,” Mr Switzer told News24 host Chris Kenny.​“If you look at France, Marine Le Pen, who’s all too often denounced as a far-right extremist…she and her party are tapping into legitimate anxieties in socialist strongholds in northern France.”​

And this is the real point.

Dame Slap leaves the elbows up Canucks behind and indulges in some rote snake bashing, which in turn descends into a listicle.

Ho hum...

Coming from a Prime Minister who promised “for the 50th time” in his 2025 election campaign not to bring in the changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax he has now brought in, who at other times also promised no changes to superannuation, a $275 reduction in energy bills, and a kinder, gentler politics, you’d have to wonder if he has any understanding of irony, or any ability to engage in self-analysis.
As if Labor’s broken promises and countless deceptions were not enough, its opponents are entitled to also say this is a government that has consciously unleashed class war in the form of punitive taxation and war between generations over housing affordability. Pauline Hanson was quite justified in responding that attacks by the Prime Minister and his Treasurer crossed a line and risked fuelling political violence.
It should come as no surprise that we have arrived at this dumbbell distribution in our political thinking. It is significantly a result of, and backlash to, the left’s successful long march through the institutions. All our major institutions labour under a left-wing dominance that Rudi Dutschke, who is credited with inventing that famous phrase, could only marvel at.

If the pond had a sixpence for every time it's read a reptile rabbiting on about the "long march through the institutions", it would likely rival Uncle Elon in wealth.

It's the incessant, endless, mindless rote repetition that gets to the pond. Do they say it to reassure themselves, or have they learned their lines the way the animals in Animal Farm are forced to recite "whatever is a leftist who goes on two legs is an enemy"?

And then the pond had another breakdown, because this dog botherer AV distraction was introduced as belonging to Sky Noise down under.

Who does the subbing at the lizard Oz these days? Why did News Corp bother with the rebranding if the reptiles can't get it right?

It's a mystery as ineluctable as transubstantiation ... Sky News host Chris Kenny weighs in on how the Albanese government is paying the price for their election lies. “Albo has broken his compact with the voting public, Albo's broken promises and lying over his latest tax grab have destroyed any trust voters had in him,” Mr Kenny said. “Trickery, lies and dishonesty, they take voters for fools. “Albo and Labor might still be arrogant, but mark my words, they are in strife, and I doubt Albo will lead them to the next election.”

At this point Dame Slap embarked on full listicle, as shallow, superficial minds in need of filling up a column are inclined to do ...

The pond decided to highlight the sort of trigger words that always send the reptiles into a slobbering frenzy:

Our universities, when not aiding and abetting the kind of antisemitic encampments that followed October 7, are busy removing concepts of merit from hiring, firing and marking papers in favour of preference to favoured groups. The law schools actively promote concepts of Indigenous sovereignty that the High Court has comprehensively rejected.
Medical schools are awash with cultural safety learnings deeply imbued with critical rights theories. John Stuart Mill’s ideas about free speech would be laughed out of lecture theatres in many arts and humanities schools.
Our public service and public institutions are similarly in thrall to the re-education camps necessary to ensure staff know when and how to give an acknowledgment of country at the drop of a hat.
We have an Australian Human Rights Commission that actively campaigns for biological males to be allowed into any female space, believes biological men who identify as women are entitled to pregnancy rights and recently complained about the human rights risks posed by data centres. Apparently, according to the AHRC, data centres may risk the human right to affordable housing. It worries that even the employment benefits of construction of data centres are dubious because the construction companies are likely to privilege able-bodied young men in employment to the detriment of women, the aged and disabled. Fancy that.
It should come as no surprise that we have arrived at this dumbbell distribution … It is significantly a result of, and backlash to, the left’s successful long march through the institutions

There it is again. The sheer mindless, endlessly stupid chanting of a phrase ...

Back to the highlighting ...

For sheer ideological fervour, the AHRC is matched only by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, whose favourite statistical weapon is the utterly bogus “gender wage gap” that ignores all the differences in skill, training and experience between male and female employees as well as different choices men and women make in employment.
Our legal system too would make Dutschke proud. We have judges making themselves the sole arbiter of free-speech laws and, in doing so, turning the law into an incomprehensible, unpredictable mess. Once-settled immigration law has been overturned by activist judges, effectively destroying rational immigration policy. Senior judges compete to outdo each other with the number of acknowledgments of country at their judicial gatherings, while some even repeat legally nonsensical claims about “land never ceded”.
Judicial commissions busily send judges who make accurate but un-PC comments about the strategic use of apprehended violence orders off to re-education camps. Two-tier justice doesn’t get quite the publicity it gets in the UK but it is alive and well in Australian courts, or at least in the handbooks judicial commissions publish. And woe betide the judge who raises perfectly valid concerns about prosecutions of alleged sexual offences that lack the bare minimum of supporting evidence.
Francis Fukuyama may once have claimed the end of history had arrived with economic liberalism’s defeat of socialism and its cousins, but it seems he spoke too soon. When it comes to our public institutions, the left has had a resounding win in every arena.

Paranoia? A complete inability to embrace reality?

This is a woman who saw her fondest dream realised ...

This is a woman with a deep affinity for One Nation and its agenda, filched in large part from the lizard Oz ...

No wonder One Nation's time appears to have arrived ... No wonder One Nation’s time appears to have arrived. Picture: Shae Beplate

And so to the final gobbet, and the allocation of blame, and a complete unawareness of what her listicle of many discontents has wrought ...

That is what drives the dumbbell shape of our politics, and the rise of One Nation. When any semblance of mid-course thought or political ideology is driven from our institutions, the middle disappears and what remains are diametrically opposed extremities. Deprived of representation in our public institutions, the only outlet for the right-hand end of the dumbbell becomes an election. No wonder One Nation’s time appears to have arrived.
Why is this not the time and opportunity for the Liberal Party? The answer is that the Liberal Party, especially its fraudulently named “moderate” wing, has connived at and contributed to the left’s march through the institutions. Its moderate wing is anything but moderate – combining a fervent desire to surrender to any allegedly progressive policy with a thuggish brand of internal politics that tries to remove conservative thought from the party.

Say what? Yet again? the left’s march through the institutions.

That's three times. By the pond's reckoning it just made one shilling and sixpence. Watch out uncle Elon.

The incessant, inane repetition, because after a movie and a Canadian travelogue, she's just an empty vessel, a hollow shell, still bitter at the way her climate science denialism helped produce a world of pain for Nepalese people ...

As always happens with useful idiots who went along with the mad King and cheered on Pauline, they always deploy the concept of "useful idiots" as a form of abuse, too dumb to understand the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby reptiles are too stupid to know that they're stupid ...
From Malcolm Turnbull’s drive to eliminate climate sceptics from the party to Julian Leeser’s misguided attempts to foist the voice on the party to the various “moderate” attempts to deprive gender-critical women of a voice, the moderates are, in effect, Dutschke’s useful idiots. By always shying away from prosecuting a culture war, they ensured the left won it. In doing so they helped nurture the remarkable rise of One Nation.
Where to from here? In Australia – as in Canada and the UK – the ideological battlelines are drawn. Albanese and co can continue to seek to win by insult, but it is doubtful that can succeed in the long run. The practical results of the left’s dominance of the culture wars are now too obvious. And voters are now being reminded of the disastrous consequences of the left’s current economic ascendancy as well. It is too early to predict an outcome, but we can at least see the shape of the conflict. It is a dumbbell, not a bell curve.

Oh it's a dumbbell all right ...

The pond feels reasonably sure that Bertrand Russell once said ...

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. (here)

And what have these dumbbells loosed upon the world,  a blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, full of passionate intensity?

Huzzah, the pond made it through the standard Dame Slap transphobia, and could turn to other forms of pathology ...

As Dame Slap started with movies, it has to be noted that there are people who think that Eyes Wide Shut is a good movie ...