In which the pond does its Friday Henry duty ...

 

It was inevitable what would dominate the reptile headlines this day, though amazingly last night ABC News 24 in its 6pm bulletin managed to ignore the obvious symbolism of a Musk truck exploding outside a Trump tower - switching to SBS solved that problem, though that solution might disappear under the mutton Dutton.

Never mind, each day the ABC is the pond's despair, almost as much despair as the reptiles produce on a daily basis.

ISIS might exploit Palestine anger to fuel terror is somehow a reptile EXCLUSIVE? 

Only in the hive mind could a reptile imagine that the bleeding obvious deserves an EXCLUSIVE tag.

Cue recent Haaretz headlines ...

'We're Still Breathing, and We Don't Want to Die': Testimonies From the Inferno in Northern Gaza, The IDF is completing its expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza – an area that once housed a population the size of Tel Aviv's. Residents who fled describe an unprecedented, brutal operation

Israeli Army Pushing Gazans Southward, Prohibiting Them From Taking Belongings, IDF soldiers even force residents to leave their clothes behind, despite humanitarian organizations' warning of dangerously cold temperatures. 

And cue this from the Haaretz daily email:

• According to the IDF, Hamas' internal security apparatus, which Shahwan led, "carried out violent interrogations against Gazans, severely violated human rights and repressed the group's opposition."
• Medics in Gaza told Reuters that the Israeli strike in Al-Mawasi killed at least 10 Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded 15. The IDF has not yet commented.
• The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza said that at least 45,581 Palestinians have been killed and 108,438 wounded since the start of the war.
• "Just two weeks ago, another Haaretz investigation revealed the arbitrariness and banality with which Gazans are killed in the Netzarim corridor and how every dead Palestinian is counted as a terrorist. Quite a few incidents described in that report happened after Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach took control of the corridor. But other accounts from soldiers reveal that the brigade's lack of discipline and the way it operates under an alternative set of laws went beyond that, with additional consequences. In early December, Vach convened the division's top officers for a review of their four months of combat in the Netzarim corridor. 'We didn't achieve our goal,' he said at the start of his remarks, according to officers who attended. The goal, they said, was to forcibly displace some 250,000 Palestinian residents who are still living in northern Gaza. In fact, only a few hundred Palestinians crossed the Netzarim corridor into southern Gaza" – Yaniv Kubovich

And so on and on ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some the reptiles care about, some the reptiles studiously ignore.

Down at the very bottom of this day's digital offerings, the reptiles tried to maintain their climate and religious rage with a flurry of meretricious EXCLUSIVES ...

The reptiles are very easily trolled, with this a classic troll ...

Really?

Is it so shocking to Jimbo and reptile sensibility to note that the liar from the Shire, allegedly an Xian, is hanging around with a sexual predator, a pussy-grabbing prevert, convicted of sexual assault?

On second thoughts, quite possibly Jimbo and the reptiles are on board with some kinds of sexual abuse ... provided they're done by their hero, King Donald I, the tangerine tyrant.

The reptile EXCLUSIVE rage about climate news did provide the pond with an excuse to note Garry Linnell in The Echnida. 

Though The Canberra Times' emails are currently on a limited holyday service (Mondays and Fridays), it's safe to say you won't read any of this sort of stuff in the lizard Oz ...

...Oscar Wilde once snarled that conversation about the weather was the last resort of the unimaginative. These days it's the preferred subject for the curious and those needing a sense of control over chaos. A recent study found one in two smartphone users regularly consult weather apps, while the industry built around this growing obsession will reap revenues of close to $2 billion this year.
Last month Google announced that its DeepMind artificial intelligence program had made an astonishing leap forward in the business of predicting the future. Its algorithms can now churn through data in a microsecond, interpreting cloud patterns and listening to the whispering of the wind to achieve unmatched and highly accurate 15-day forecasts.
Fifteen days. It's a bold promise, almost godlike in its scope; a development that combines the two most pressing issues destined to radically alter human life for generations to come - climate change and the rapidly evolving industry of AI.
Fifteen days. How remarkable. Farmers once gave the Bureau of Meteorology a standing ovation when it got it right over the weekend. Weather app addicts like me are rejoicing. But it's not enough. While we celebrate the micro we choose to ignore the macro. Fifteen days tells us whether we'll need an umbrella in a fortnight. It doesn't predict the storm gathering on the horizon that will lay siege to our place in the world in the coming decades.
The year 2023 was the planet's hottest in more than 170 years of forensic bookkeeping. It was also, just as disturbingly, 0.15 of a degree warmer than 2016 - the previous title holder for the hottest year. Once the data is finalised, it is expected 2024 will eclipse all records, a pattern expected to worsen in the coming decade. "The last two years have been kind of supercharged," noted the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, recently.
We've all sensed the longer summers, shorter winters and the increasing violence of storms. The 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the past decade. Recent data suggests climate change caused 41 additional days of dangerous heat in the world last year, while intensifying 26 out of 29 major weather events that caused thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people.

Say what? The pond is only informed by the reptile hive mind. What is this bizarre talk of a climate crisis? Please, do go on ...

Australia, parched and dehydrated for hundreds of thousands of years, is now 1.5 degrees warmer on average than a century ago. This sort of catastrophic shift should chill the warmest marrow in our bones. But we continue sleepwalking into the future. I ask if it will rain in 15 days. I don't want to ask if my granddaughter will be able to breathe the air in 50 years.
Like so many others I've become so impressed by our audacity at predicting the unpredictable that I forget those forecasts on my touchscreen are little more than a short-term gimmick. The future won't present itself to us with cute little icons representing recent precipitation levels and wind speeds. The only accurate forecast is that it will be much wilder and messier, wracked by longer droughts and apocalyptic blazes as the ice caps melt and sea levels rise.
But even now, decades after the first alarm bells sounded, we don't want to talk about it. I experienced a month in the Arctic last year, hiking across shrinking glaciers and increasingly exposed tundra. When I returned I passionately preached to friends and colleagues about the dangers ahead. And each time their eyes glazed over a little more.
So now I immerse myself in weather apps and pathetically celebrate 15-day forecasts. A marvel, perhaps. But they will never be enough. The future isn't something we can predict or control. The future is something we shape with every choice we make. And it's clear we've decided we're not brave enough to make those hard choices required to save it.

Well yes, "sleepwalking" is just the right somnambulistic condition required for reading the lizard Oz. Eyes wide shut and fully glazed is what happens when you read the reptiles ...

But setting genuine terror aside, the pond knew its Friday duty.

A quick survey of the far right extremities of the digital rag confirmed what had to be done...

Forget Charles  "each way" Wooley, woolly by name and by nature, and Rodger sounding the alarums. 

No need to wander off with them, at least not when we have our Henry and one of his spectacular history lessons, usually sublimely irrelevant, but always sublime in their own bizarre, deeply weird way ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some our Henry cares about, some our Henry studiously ignores.

Return of Islamist terror a test for our lax laws, With the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo approaching – and the US now reeling from the New Orleans terror attack – there can be no complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.

Why go back to Hebdo? Partly for a snap...

Protesters hold copies of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo during an anti-terrorism vigil at Place de La Republique for the murdered school teacher Samuel Paty.

Perhaps it might have been better for the reptiles to go full on, rather than discretely show that image being held up ...

Okay, that gives the pond its fundamentalist-deploring credentials, essential before proceeding and absorbing our Henry's history lesson ...

A few days before Christmas, a French court condemned Brahim Chnina and Abdelhakim Sefrioui to 13 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively for their role in the murder five years ago of Samuel Paty.
Coming on the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and with the US reeling after the terrorist attack in New Orleans, the court’s decision highlights the dangers of complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.
Paty, a secondary school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northeast of Paris, had, as required by the national curriculum, taught a session on freedom of expression using the attack on Charlie Hebdo to highlight what was at stake.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the prophet Mohammed were on the Ministry of Education’s website for teachers to use in their presentations. But before projecting the cartoons, Paty warned his class that some students might find them shocking. He therefore invited any students who feared being offended to leave the class while they were being shown and then return for the general discussion.

At this point the reptiles tried to remind our Henry that there's been a lot of terrorism under the Gaza bridge since then with an AV offering designed to spread FUD and alarums about Australia missing out on its fair share of attacks by terrorists ...

Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman discusses the domestic implications of the New Orleans truck attack which claimed the lives of at least 15 people and injured dozens of others. This comes after the FBI is treating the incident as a possible terrorist attack. “Our terrorism alert level is probable that is not where you would ever want it to be,” Mr Gorman said. “We’ll continue to do everything we can, as an Australian government, to keep Australians safe at home … but we all have a role to play.”

Our Henry managed to ignore that attempt to spread FUD about Australia and pressed on with his history lesson ...

The discussion itself proceeded uneventfully. However, that evening, Chnina’s daughter told her father that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the room, giving him free rein to launch into a tirade against Islam. Paty had, of course, done no such thing. Moreover, it emerged that the girl, who had a long record of truancy, had not even attended class. But that didn’t stop Chnina from decrying on social media what he described as an Islamophobic attack on his daughter.
Chnina’s posts were soon drawn to the attention of Sefrioui, who has run a series of “anti-Islamophobia” organisations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on some of France’s leading mosques to publicise Chnina’s concocted claims, Sefrioui mounted a vitriolic campaign denouncing Paty, in posts downloaded more than 100,000 times, as an Islamophobe who had ridiculed the prophet Mohammed.
One of the people viewing Sefrioui’s videos was Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee. Having purchased butcher’s knives, Anzorov repeatedly stabbed Paty as he was leaving school, before decapitating him with a meat cleaver.
Anzorov, who immediately posted a video of the beheading, died in a confrontation with police. What matters here, and deserves more attention than it has received, is the court’s careful reasoning in its verdict against Sefrioui.
While Sefrioui’s attacks on Paty were venomous, he was consistently cautious in what he posted. Having been involved in previous controversies, he appears to have sought legal advice about exactly how far he could go before being accused of incitement to violence.
As a result, Sefrioui never called for Paty to be assaulted, much less murdered; exemplifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that the “bad man walks the line”, he clearly tried to benefit from the constitutional protection of freedom of expression by stopping short of explicitly urging violence.

It's easy, and fair game, even if sublimely irrelevant to the current events that set our Henry in motion.

At this point, it's a ritual to note that the pond has no truck with fundamentalists of any kind or stripe, and frequently wonders why it pays such attention to fundamentalist reptiles, either fanatically religious (the bromancer), fanatically climate science denying (the bromancer), or both (the bromancer).

Never mind, have a snap, Emmanuel Macron pays his respects at the coffin of Samuel Paty inside the Sorbonne courtyard in October 2020.

Back to our Henry doing his Michel Houellebecq impression ...

It is, however, equally clear that his posts, which urged Muslims to fulfil their duty to punish blasphemers, were addressed to an audience that included violent extremists, who would interpret them as a call to arms. As the court argued, the question, in these situations, is not what a reasonable person would make of the posts’ literal content; it is whether there was a material and reasonably foreseeable probability that they would result in violence.
The issue that raises is not a new one. On the contrary, it featured prominently, as “the Mark Antony question”, in the debates that framed the classic American jurisprudence on the limits of freedom of expression. The reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is scarcely accidental: no work in the English language is more squarely focused on “the power of speech/To stir men’s blood”.

Normally the pond wouldn't interrupt our Henry in full flight, but that mention of Shakspere sent our Henry into a kind of post-Thucydides, ecstatic trance ...

Some might wonder what this has to do with wretched mass murder in the streets of New Orleans, or a Musk truck exploding, but they must be newbies to the company of the hole in bucket man ...

Between 1581 and 1602, London had been rocked by 35 outbreaks of widespread disorder, more often than not induced by firebrands. However, Shakespeare’s concern was not just with fiery calls to mayhem: it was also with the ability of orators to induce violence, despite pretending not to.
Never has that ability been as starkly displayed as it is in Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body. In a text of dazzling brilliance – the speech, which is barely 1100 words long, deploys fully 52 of the 90 major elements of classical rhetoric, including those associated with “oratio obliqua” – Mark Antony “lets slip the dogs of war”, while repeatedly proclaiming Brutus an “honourable man”.
Stirred by the speech to cry “Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!”, the mob runs riot in the streets, murdering a harmless poet because he has the same name as one of Caesar’s assassins. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, admiring his handiwork, says coldly to himself, “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot”.
It was with Mark Antony’s oration in mind that the US Supreme Court rejected Judge Learned Hand’s finding, in Masses Publishing Co. v Patten (1917), that speech only breached the prohibition on incitement if it involved “direct advocacy” of illegal action. However, the Supreme Court’s own “clear and present danger” test raised more questions than it answered.
In Dennis (1950), Learned Hand, by then chief judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, therefore tried to give the test some precision, writing that the courts “must ask whether the gravity of the ‘evil’ ” that could be caused by the speech, “discounted by its improbability (of occurrence)”, justifies its condemnation.

Dammit, he's a veritable book of quotations, interrupted only by a snap People gather on Place de la Republique in homage to history teacher Samuel Paty.

How many gather to pay homage to the many thousands dead in Gaza and the West Bank?

Never mind, that image seemed to send Henry into a freedom of expression frenzy...

What the French court has done is to adapt and apply that test to the age of online Islamic extremism. It accepted that Chnina and Sefrioui neither specifically advocated violence nor conspired with Anzorov in carrying it out. But given how predictable it was that their campaign would induce violence, it concluded that they were, legally and materially, Anzorov’s associates in his terrorist act.
Unfortunately, the Australian laws on incitement fall well short of that level of intellectual sophistication. We seem to struggle with the idea that the law must erect, and effectively enforce, a wall of separation between advocacy, which it protects, and inciting, overtly or covertly, the violence that makes societies unlivable.
Far from preserving the freedom of expression, ignoring that requirement only empowers freedom’s worst enemies, while every act of terrorism weakens its friends. A free society cannot survive if its citizens come to believe that the price of freedom is perpetual fear.

Hang on, hang on, surely the entire point of the reptile business model is perpetual fear?

Would that it were not so, but each day hate mongers fill the digital edition pages.

Each day women must still live in fear of Catholic-inspired terrorism, the latest examples emanating from Queensland and South Australia.

It is no trivial matter that Australian papists can, together with Islamic fundamentalists - and with complete impunity - propose legislation to strip women of the control of their bodies.

Oh sorry, the pond always gets its history lessons wrong, and so must attend to our Henry's final words in his history lecture for the day.

It is therefore no trivial matter that Australian imams can, with complete impunity, refer to Jews as “pigs, rats and termites”. Nor is it a trivial matter that the government, having stoked a climate in which unreason festers, disowns, like Mark Antony, any responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.
“Poetry,” said WH Auden, “makes nothing happen.” But rhetoric, history shows, makes things happen, on a frightening scale. And as Michel de Montaigne put it, in his essay “Of the Vanitie of Words” that scholars believe influenced Shakespeare, the harm it wreaks is at its greatest “when the commonwealths affaires are in worst estate, and the devouring Tempest of civill broyles most agitates and turmoiles them”.
As 2025 opens with our own commonwealth’s affairs “in worst estate”, that is a warning we can no longer afford to ignore.

But what of the terrorism on view in Gaza and the West Bank? 

What of former PMs hanging around with convicted sexual predators?

What, for that matter, of the sources of domestic terrorism at home?

Sorry, you can't expect the reptiles to pay attention to Catholic fundamentalists; they are, after all, the home of Catholic fundamentalism.

And with that, it's time to return to the US for a few Luckovichs, as a way of wrapping up the day with a few insights into a deeply troubled country discovering what that talk of chickens coming home to roost means ...

In which the pond indulges visionary Ted, before spending time with Lionel ...

 

The pond simply had to leave the current US civil war alone for awhile, and not even the news that the liar from the Shire had found his natural home could sway the pond ...

But with that determination came slim pickings ...

The pond plunged past Jack the Insider in reptile election campaign mode. There had to be something better ...

Usually the pond ignores the politicians who parade in the lizard Oz, but this is the silly season, and Ted is a visionary, and there was no way the pond could ignore his vision, outlined in an alarmingly short - 3 minutes so the reptiles insist - visionary tract entitled Labor betting our economy on green energy pipedream, What Jim Chalmers doesn’t understand is that, by itself, a bigger electricity system only guarantees higher costs and a greater environmental burden.

A few might quibble at the great dreaming, the splendid vision, such as Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Treasurer Jim Chalmers at Ampol Oil refinery at Lytton. Picture: Lachie Millard

But Ted himself is very high energy about his vision of a low energy future ... with a transformed pond deciding to throw away its big telly and revert to a humble 23" model ...

Labor has launched its most bizarre argument yet against the Coalition’s energy plan, claiming its own higher energy costs are good for economic growth.
Reframing the energy debate to be about economic growth is crazy brave for a government overseeing Australia’s slowest economic growth in 30 years, outside the pandemic.
But it’s also fundamentally flawed. It makes no economic sense to assume an economy is better off if it’s forced to consume more electricity, especially at an extraordinary cost for households and businesses to switch away from other energy sources. But more on this in a moment.
A few weeks ago, independent analysis by Frontier Economics showed the Coalition’s plan for a balanced energy mix of renewables, nuclear and gas to be $263bn, or 44 per cent, cheaper than Labor’s renewables-only scheme. In triggering Labor’s latest attack, Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn’t take aim at Frontier’s modelling.
Nor has the national science agency, the CSIRO, or the market operator, AEMO, criticised Frontier’s work, which is notable given Labor’s reliance on these organisations for advice on energy economics.

Strange, the pond must have read CSIRO refutes Coalition case nuclear is cheaper than renewable energy due to operating life in some sort of fever dream.

It would have been negligent, derelict for the reptiles to have ignored the oracle of New England, and so Barners, onetime of Tamworth, onetime a city at the centre of the known universe, was wheeled in for an AV distraction (apparently the centre of the universe has shifted to Mar-a-Lago):

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce says Labor’s anti-nuclear scare campaigns are an expected “overreaction”. “Overreaction you would expect,” Mr Joyce said. “From people who just do not want an alternative to baseload power.”

Inspirational stuff, though the pond was shattered that the reptiles preferred a snap of an abject cliff top dweller to Barners himself.

Ted was inspired by Barners' back up to dismiss those neighsayers in remote 'leet circles:

As the CSIRO and AEMO say in their GenCost report on the levelised cost of energy, their work is “not a substitute for … electricity system modelling”. Full electricity system modelling is precisely what Frontier did. Frontier also used CSIRO and AEMO’s cost assumptions, but modelled nuclear even more conservatively at $10,000/KW.
No wonder Labor is struggling to find a line of attack. But that hasn’t stopped Chalmers claiming Labor’s energy plan will drive higher economic growth, despite it costing 44 per cent more than the Coalition’s through to 2050. It takes some mental gymnastics to follow Chalmers’ logic, but it goes something like this: Labor will build a bigger electricity system and thus the economy should grow more.
What Chalmers doesn’t understand is that, by itself, a bigger electricity system only guarantees higher costs and a greater environmental burden. He also clearly doesn’t know that Australians used less electricity from the grid over the past decade and yet the economy still grew. Whether more electricity enables the economy to grow depends on how it is used, which in turn is a function of its cost and reliability. Labor’s renewables-only plan fails on both counts compared to the Coalition’s: it will be far more expensive and it will be unreliable without 24/7 baseload power. It will also emit more by 2050.
While the Coalition has accepted an AEMO forecast for an electricity system that expands by 60 per cent by 2050, Labor’s policies require a system more than twice the size of our current one.
This will come at a massive $640bn cost that will ultimately hit people’s bills, and this is only the utility-scale costs. It excludes the cost of rooftop solar, home batteries and EVs that Labor wants households to pay for out of their own pockets.
Chalmers also doesn’t understand what is driving Labor’s desire for a bigger grid. But it is all laid out in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan – which the Prime Minister has confirmed is also Labor’s plan.
First, Labor is taking a ginormous bet on green hydrogen. Labor plans to use the equivalent of 30 per cent of current grid consumption for green hydrogen by 2050.
While there’s a role for green hydrogen, making it commercially scalable requires a far lower cost of production. Building a far more expensive system isn’t how you get there.

Just to remind readers of the visionary, the energy sage desperate to nuke the country to save the planet - though most of the reptiles seem to think it doesn't need saving - the lizard Oz provided a snap of the 'think small' man, Ted O'Brien in question time. Picture: Martin Ollman

As for EVs, don't even dream about it...

Second, Labor is taking a similar big bet on electric vehicles. Its plan is for 99 per cent of all vehicles on the road to be EVs by 2050. Australians don’t like being told what to do, let alone what car to drive. Until tradies, farmers and grey nomads have a change of heart about their preferred vehicles, this is yet another Labor pipedream.

Damn you Uncle Leon, you preening prat... why, it's a futuristic electric nightmare ...

 ...there's not a grey nomad in sight, much like you can't find a working charger on the Hume ...

And then there's that electricity mania:

Third, Labor wants to electrify everything. Its plan is for people to disconnect their homes from gas, and refurbish their kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems to be powered only by electricity.

Not the kitchens!

Ted had the pond sobbing in fear and fright ... and then he settled it all with a final burst...

This is, again, to come out of the family budget, at a cost Labor won’t disclose. None of these are policies to enable economic growth, but rather an ideological wish list that flagrantly disregards the impact on everyday Australians. To be fair, Labor’s desire to more than double the size of the electricity system does accommodate one economic lever – higher population growth. According to Oxford Economics Australia, this assumption is a key driver of economic growth in Labor’s plan.
Chalmers should clarify how big an Australia he’s planning for. As a nation, we’re already struggling amid a housing crisis, and our cities and roads are congested and need modernisation.
Yet, instead of allocating scarce capital to tackle problems such as housing and infrastructure, the Treasurer is misallocating investment for a colossal overbuild of our electricity system.
Labor’s plan will make Australians poorer and our economy weaker.
Ted O’Brien is opposition energy spokesman.

Ted has convinced the pond, and the sooner we all get back to a coal-fired country - pending nuking it on a never never time line - the better for all ...

The pond had thought to give Peter Kurti a go, what with him offering up Citizenship based on rights won’t restore nation’s civil society, The practice of citizenship entails a shared responsibility that each of us bears for the wellbeing of the national community to which we belong. It is a responsibility that cannot be delegated to others.

But then the pond stumbled at the end:

...One sign of that weakening is that whereas Australians habitually trusted one another to “do the right thing” in every situation, we are now much less trusting of one another and have become increasingly suspicious of anything and anyone unfamiliar to us.
Turning the page of a new year, as we have just done, is an appropriate moment for us to rethink our attitudes to one another and to our nation.
Australia remains a beacon to hordes overseas eager to share our good fortune. After all, six million people from many countries have become citizens here since 1949 when a new citizenship law came into force.
So it should be of concern to each of us that the bonds of participation and belonging – the key marks of citizenship – are fraying.
One factor accounting for this fragmentation is identity politics-based multiculturalism that has continued to generate enclaves not only keen to preserve cultures distinct from Australia but that are also increasingly intolerant of difference.

Oh FFS, not the old identity politics multiculturalism dog whistle about pesky, difficult furriners (aka Muslims, never Catholics loyal to Rome).

Another factor is that we are now quick to assert rights against others: the right to do whatever we want, the right to choose for ourselves (including now the right to die when we want) and the right to cancel those with whom we disagree.

Except of course, those wretches who celebrate multiculturalism and such like, they simply can't be tolerated and must be cancelled, because preaching about cancel culture is the first duty of the anti-woke.

And so on, and so dribbling forth, in a way far from inspirational and communal:

But we have forgotten that rights also involve duties, such as the duty to tolerate the views we dislike. We are inclined to see citizenship as matter of status – asserting the rights that flow from the political fact of being a citizen.
But we need to expand our focus and understand that a principal chief factor of citizenship is not so much status as practice. In other words, we need to reframe our idea of citizenship not so much in terms of being as of doing.
The practice of citizenship entails a shared responsibility that each of us bears for the wellbeing of the national community to which we belong.
It is a responsibility that cannot be delegated to others; neither is it one that can be shunned – at least if we are sincere about our pride in identifying as citizens of the nation of Australia.
Perhaps practical citizenship does not come naturally to us. After all, it requires that we consis­tently preference the needs of others over our own needs and desires.
But we have many examples set before us and the annual anointing of leading citizens as Australians of the Year can, if nothing else, encourage us to strive for yet higher ideals in 2025.
Peter Kurti is director of the culture, prosperity and civil society program at the Centre for Independent Studies and adjunct associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame Australia.

By golly, they must be desperate at Notre Dame if this is the best they can do ...

Yadda, yadda all the way, and instead for a bonus, the pond turned to Lionel aka Margaret aka Maggie (according to her wiki, as a tomboy she felt a masculine name was more appropriate), a woman with any number of issues, but most notably in recent times frantic in her scribbling about woke brain rot, which naturally invokes the standard pond contractual requirement:

Not so much fuckhead perhaps as Maggie head ...

This offering came to the lizard Oz days late via The Times, Donald Trump’s election win shows progressive lunacy has been roundly defeated, A decisive death knell for identity politics offers hope of an end to stupid debates — such as whether women can have penises, or if racial discrimination cures racism.

Dash it all, but naturally it began with a snap of King Donald I and somebody or other, Donald Trump’s election win over Kamala Harris may have signalled a turning point for identity politics. Picture: AFP:

Sadly Lionel completely ignored the way things have moved on since those ancient times. There's not a single mention of the current civil war ...

... which admittedly is something of a relief, given the pond feels the need to swear off it for the moment, it being too intoxicating, especially as we haven't even yet reached inauguration day ...

Instead Lionel was still basking in the wonders of the non-left media world ...

Across the non-left media world, it’s now an article of faith that Donald Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed. After asking petulantly for year upon year, “Now have we hit peak woke?”, like children on the back seat nagging daddy “are we there yet?”, we learn repeatedly from conservative outlets that the progressive lunacy that has tormented us since about 2014 (if not since 1965) has been roundly defeated.
A decisive death knell for identity politics dangles the blessed possibility of no longer squandering our brief duration on this Earth on stupid conversations and debates over whether: women can have penises; racial discrimination cures racism; advancement in employment and education should be determined by skin colour; the Western civilisation that gave us penicillin, Rembrandt, Bach and the Hubble Space Telescope is a disgrace; being grotesquely fat is healthy; 

Indeed, indeed, waiter, spare the big Macs ...

Sorry for that portly interruption, do go on ...

and wearing a sombrero that you bought yourself on Amazon is theft.
Friends, the folks who’ve really been stealing – and high-value items: our precious time, energy and attention – are the doctrinal morons who’ve roped us into addressing these painfully self-evident questions. I have devoted whole afternoons to seriously considering whether a mass movement to sterilise children and cut off their healthy body parts is a good idea.

Friends? Nah, you're not my friend, why you're not even an American politician seeking a donation. 

And as for doctrinal morons, shouldn't we be talking about the retards, and all the face fucking,  and all the fools ...

Kekius Maximus? Don't ask, it's what toddlers do, and the pond feels like doing it too, having just endured two and a half hours of life-wasting Gladiator II, stunning evidence that 2024 provided strong rivals to Megalopolis for 'worst picture of the year' awards...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were fixated on the horror, the horror, Trans rights demonstrators protest moves in the UK to make it harder for transgender people to self-identify. Picture: Getty Images

Lionel, aka Maggie, was keen to celebrate the persecution of the different and the other ...

Agreed, then: we yearn to put this rank idiocy behind us. In fact, I’m intensely curious how this period of communal madness will be regarded once it’s foreshortening in the rear-view mirror. Will this era’s edges blur until, in retrospect, “cancel culture” is remembered as rather cute? Will historians recall only that for a funny little period people cared innocuously more than usual about “social justice”? Or will the reign of woke instead take its place alongside Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s show trials and Pol Pot’s killing fields as a lower-fatality example of a whole society losing its collective mind?
As for that rear-view mirror, there are promising signs. Preferred pronouns are quietly dropping from email signatures. The sanctimonious University of Michigan is firing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff. Walmart has dropped the term DEI altogether. Investors are suing the retailer Target for putting commitments to DEI, environmental, social and governance and Pride Month above the interests of shareholders. Formerly left-wing Silicon Valley billionaires are publicly excited about, or even bidding to participate in, the Trump administration.

Ah yes, the billionaires, such fun, and never mind the left behinds ...

At this point the reptiles decided to interrupt with an AV distraction, Journal Editorial Report: From DEI to ESG, progressive projects faltered.

Lionel was on a roll ...

The atmosphere on podcasts is suddenly more permissive; why, it might finally be safe to make a joke. In the UK, the 2024 John Lewis Christmas advert doesn’t look as though it was filmed in Nigeria. In the US, Democratic media figures are drowning in self-pity, while the viewership of the hectoring MSNBC channel has plummeted. Red states are banning gender-defying care for minors, and these laws have a good chance of holding up in the US Supreme Court. The word “retarded” is enjoying a comeback.

Yes, there's no better fun than mocking the physically or intellectually challenged.  (It's appropriate to give them a punch in the guts along with the verbal assault, just to remind them of the place assigned to retards and literary scribblers giving themselves airs and graces).

Still, I worry that we’re jumping the gun. This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won’t be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete’s foot comes right back? One American election won’t do the trick. There are too many people with a vested interest in wokery because “decolonising the curriculum”, say, is their job. Many a museum director has been hired expressly to ensure an art collection doesn’t acquire work by white people.
Numerous black female hires who tick two boxes in a diversity “buy one, get one free”, but are sometimes conspicuously under-qualified, such as ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, owe their appointments to that fungal way of thinking, and they won’t all go quietly. America’s entire Democratic Party is steeped in this brain rot, and Kamala Harris still came within 1.5 percentage points of winning the popular vote.

Wokery?

Sorry, there were just too many references for the pond to evade strict contractual requirements whenever the concept comes out ...

Meanwhile, there's nothing like random death to get the likes of the reptiles and Lionel excited, A protester at the court case involving Daniel Penny, who was acquitted over the death of Jordan Neely, who had been threatening people on a subway. Picture: AFP

Damn you, if someone's misbehaving on a bus or a train, the best solution is to just take them out. Kill 'em, kill 'em all. A slaughter fest ...

Won't give up a seat in a bus? You need Sly Stallone ... sure, there might be a little collateral damage, the odd window shattered, but it's being civic minded.

On both sides of the Atlantic the universities, the judicial system, NGOs, the legal and medical professions, the news media, cultural institutions, theatre, publishing, film: they’ve all been putrefied by the zombie fungus. Picture the special effects for The Last of Us, all those hairy tendrils and fibrous clumps crawling up the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.
So this is a long fight that’s not yet won. That’s not to detract from the cheerful impression that we sane people do seem to have gained the upper hand right now. Indeed, I’ve never doubted that our level-headed and unindoctrinated contingent – however beleaguered, persecuted and shockingly few in number – has always been destined to win, because lunacy eventually collapses from its own contradictions. It has only ever been a question of how much longer we have to put up with this staggering bullshit.
As for the present juncture, I have a theory. Let’s remember the nature of the opposition. Wokesters are conformists. They didn’t invent their wretched ideas; they’re reading from a common hymn sheet. That’s why they all use the same words and subscribe to the exact same roster of convictions, no matter how preposterous: these people aren’t original thinkers. But they imagine they’re at the cutting edge. Being “progressive” means they’re in the vanguard. They think woke makes them modern, makes them hip.

Sadly at this point the pond ran out of woke illustrations for that use of "wokesters", though the splendid irony of Lionel conforming to MAGA world thinkery did provide a consoling irony.

Then came a snap of reptile favourites, big in the Victorian liberal party, Members of the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminists) movement in Melbourne in March. Picture: Tony Gough

Deeply weird, and a cue for a final burst from Lionel ...with more "woke" mentions than any soma head could stand ...

Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly “people living with obesity”. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve “turned the page” and “we’re not going back”.
Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered) you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.
So they won’t spout lingo like “cisgender” if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about “white privilege” is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy/ neurodiversity/heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.

It turned out the whole rant was just a handy way to promote a book ...Lionel Shriver’s latest book, Mania, is published by the Borough Press. This article was first published by Spiked.
The Times

Shame about the reviews ...

For people who only think of Shriver for her culture war op-eds – it’s been a long time since We Need to Talk About Kevin – she’s always been a distinctively straight-shooting literary critic. Even she seems to sense that, for all the needle, this novel lacks verve or sass, stretching thinly dramatised ideas – political correctness has gone mad; we should worry about Putin, not pronouns – over nearly 300 pages. When Emory asks: “Why is this so personal for you, Pearson? So maybe there’s such a thing as variable human intelligence, and maybe there isn’t. What does it matter? Most of all, why does it matter between you and me?”, it’s as if even Shriver is beginning to lose interest, and we’re only a third of the way through. Pearson begins one expository tranche by telling us: “To my embarrassment, here I am relating picayune points of philological fascism – the death of the ‘dumbbell’ – while, out in the rest of the world, events of more considerable moment were afoot.” Another ends: “Transcribing this is tedious and depressing, so I think that taster will suffice.” Yup.

Yup, make that a triple yup to go ... and finally it would be remiss of the pond not to note Charlie Sykes doing limericks in a way that Lionel might approve ...

Trump's nominee RFK junior

Pretends to defend the consumer

But a worm in his brain

Seemed to drive him insane

Now his intellect's only a rumor

**

He says he is anti-vaccine,

And that immunization's obscene

His polio plan

Is to impose a ban

Making iron-lung tech more routine.

Of glamorous dreams she had many,

But of love felt Melania not any

Still, her life became fraught

when despite what she'd thought

She really had earned every penny

As for Lionel's new year, it's full of splendid hopes, tremendous visions, mindlessly moronic nattering about woke, and an ongoing civil war ...

Welcome in the new year with a Lynch mob lynching? That's beyond the vale of tears and into the hills of madness ...

 

After a restful early night's sleep undisturbed by fireworks, the pond woke to a burning question. Which reptile would usher in the new year for the pond?

One thing was certain. The pond wouldn't begin with the likes of this Politico story.

Sheesh, 2028? No link, it was simply too offensive.

Give it a rest already. No wonder many Americans feel lost, alienated, distanced from the chattering class. Just making it through 2025 will be a miracle enough without wondering about 2028.

The pond also had to abandon any attempt to keep up with the latest civil war news ...

If you want that yarn, you can find it at source or outside the soft paywall, at Republicans Admit MAGA Civil War Is a Total ‘S***show’—and It’s Only Gonna Get Worse.

“Often when Elon Musk goes about policy, he’s actually wrong about most of it, and the scary part is most members of Congress don’t realize he’s actually wrong. They just say, ‘Yes, let’s go in that direction.’ Mike Johnson, I think he’s a smart guy who knows that Donald Trump is often wrong and Elon Musk is often wrong, so he’s in this place where he has to navigate the caucus of Trump/Musk followers while also actually doing the business of government,” former Rep. David Jolly of Florida said.

With the greatest respect, Mike Johnson is about as smart as the rocket in Oscar Wilde's story and might soon be settling into the mud ... looking up at the weird stars cavorting above in the skies.

And then came Steve Bannon Ramps Up MAGA Civil War With Graphic Threat to Elon Musk.

On the last episode of the year for Bannon’s War Room podcast, he sent a threatening message to the SpaceX founder: “Don’t come up and go to the pulpit and... start lecturing people about the way things are going to be... If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”

Eek, the leopard party eating faces.

In the middle of all the confusion came this news ...

Apparently they do, courtesy Katie Francis ...GOP Acknowledges Climate Change to Justify Greenland Takeover. Inter alia ...

Speaking on Sunday Morning Futures, O’Brien envisioned a future in which the U.S. could cut down on using the Panama Canal “as the climate gets warmer.”
“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” he said to guest host Jason Chaffetz on Fox News.
“It’s strategically very important to the Arctic which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.
Critics seemed shocked by both the boldness of trying to acquire Greenland, and that O’Brien was willing to invoke climate change as a justification for doing so.
“Wait so they accept climate change as real to justify annexing sovereign nations?” one account wrote in response to O’Brien’s speech.

Climate science, say hello to imperialism.

But enough of all that, time to see what the local reptiles had on offer this day ...

It seems it's definitely 2025, though you might wonder, what with the lying rodent and Petey boy still dominating the reptile headlines. Day after day the members of the hive mind have to enjoy lying little Johnnie and Petey boy, as if the rag was infested with the Y2K bug and never recovered.

At least the pond won't have to worry about getting the date wrong while signing cheques (ask your grandparents, vulgar phone-tapping youffs). 

Over on the extreme far right, the list of contenders was beyond dismal ...

Usher in the new year with the Lynch mob? 

Imre, who these days passes himself off as "an author and journalist", made a valiant attempt by listing the dead 'uns, It has been a year of notable obituaries — and deep confusion, There have been so many notable obituaries in 2024 – they have all merged inside my brain...

But the pond only came away with the deeply confusing captions to the snaps scattered in the yarn ...

<a capiid="92a2d4bea4866721bfc78dfa0442ae8e" class="capi-link">Jimmy Carter.</a>
<a capiid="d693383edf13588e74d4414fc1211ff4" class="capi-link">Dame Maggie Smith.</a>
<a capiid="3c6e3df15521cd1cefceea60f0f08ef3" class="capi-link">James Earl Jones.</a>
<a capiid="405f5412ad636c9463941f07d9ca269d" class="capi-link">Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer.</a>
<a capiid="85f3572d89e072d032bc8e34fd2c0c8e" class="capi-link">Jack Karlson.</a>

The pond guesses that some reptile had a most excellent New Year's Eve...

And so to the ongoing, enduring tragedy of the Lynch mob ... though the reptiles promised Why Donald Trump is the anti-Carter president, No former president taught Donald Trump more about the office than did Jimmy Carter. The returning president is the anti-Carter was only a waste of three minutes of the pond's time, even as the sand started its relentless run through the 2025 hour glass.

The Lynch mob is showing signs of lurching off into deep MAGA territory, so it was appropriate that the yarn began with President-elect Donald Trump speaks at the Phoenix Convention Centre. Picture: agencies.

Here we must put aside such stories as Trump Pisses Off MAGA Fans With Sudden Reversal on Jimmy Carter:

Donald Trump’s public condolences for former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away at the age of 100 on Sunday, sparked an uproar among his own fans.
“I just heard of the news about the passing of President Jimmy Carter. Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.
“The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Trump wrote. “Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter Family and their loved ones during this difficult time. We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and prayers.”
Apparently, that relatively simple statement was too much for some in the MAGA crowd, according to RawStory.
“Lol, I know you’re being nice. But you’re tripping,” replied an account called Theodore Winters. “Carter was a terrible president and damaged The United States Of America to such an extent that we are STILL dealing with his horribly policy decisions and his inflation repercussions in 2024.”

Lol, this was the Lynch mob's attempt to get noticed by Raw Story ... and if the Lynch mob failed in the Kool-aid fuelled attempt, it wasn't for want of trying ...

Donald Trump is about to become the 47th president of the United States – but that is only if you count Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was one of the worst. Trump, then in his early 30s, watched and learned. No former president taught Trump more about the office than did Carter. The returning president is the anti-Carter.
While Trump is an instinctive, gut-driven leader, this does not mean he has no compass. If that compass has one face on it, it is Carter’s. For decades, Trump has been asking “What would Carter do?”, working out what that might be, then doing the opposite.
Where Carter appeased, Trump would threaten. Where Carter dithered, Trump would act. Where Carter finger-wagged, Trump would fist-pump. Where Carter was weak, Trump would be strong.
These are simple precepts. They have sustained Trump’s leadership style from boardroom to television studio to Oval Office.
The overcomplications of Carter would be solved by the simplicity of executive power under Trump. Carter tried to micromanage everything.

Naturally at this point the reptiles interrupted with a picture of Jimmy Carter, apparently the only solution to making the tangerine tyrant look good.

One thing that Carer did which was notable was pardoning the draft dodgers who had sensibly avoided the war in 'Nam.

The Lynch mob, by way of contrast, was besotted by trivia and endless details:

He was famously involved in the purchasing of the White House’s styrofoam cups. Of the 85 Federalist Papers, none covers that use of presidential power.
Trump is not a details man. He invites chaos and encourages churn. The staff turnover in his first term was legendary. He never trusted any one cabinet member very long. He liked to watch them fight among themselves. His administration was undeniably his. Elon Musk, take note.
Again, Carter was the opposite. His cardiganed collegiality was warm but ineffective. He chose big characters to run his foreign policy, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, men who had a deep dislike for each other. But he could not choose between them.
Carter inadvertently fostered tension without any resulting creativity. His decision to attempt a rescue of Americans at the US embassy in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis was taken while Vance, his secretary of state, was on vacation.
In the months preceding this, the Carter administration pursued every kind of back channel into revolutionary Iran. None paid off. This bizarre tale is told brilliantly by Gary Sick in his book All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran.
Compare the approach of both presidents to Iran. In 1980, Carter jumped through every hoop to find a peaceful solution to the kidnapping by student revolutionaries of 52 American diplomats. In 2020, Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian shadow commander radicalised by that undergraduate humiliation of the US, was coldly assassinated on Trump’s orders.

It was a relief when the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction:

A state funeral will be held for former United States president Jimmy Carter in Washington DC on January 9. The southern governor turned president died Sunday local time aged 100 after spending the last year and a half in hospice being treated for cancer. President Joe Biden has declared it a national day of mourning. The president has also issued an executive order directing government agencies to close on the day to pay their respects.

Meanwhile, the Lynch mob kept trying to use Carter as a way of bolstering a blustering bully:

Trump accompanied this with the tweet: “WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
“If you’re Donald Trump,” said Stephen Metcalf, historian of the period, “it’s always 1979. Mr Trump carries Mr Carter with him everywhere, as a kind of anti-self. If Mr Carter was deliberative, Mr Trump must be reactive; where Mr Carter was essentially sermonic, a devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian of human limits, Mr Trump is comedic-demagogic, a fan of Norman Vincent Peale, the pop-evangelist behind ‘positive thinking’.’’
We are used to seeing Bidenomics as Trump’s opposite; it was the precondition for Trump’s remarkable victory in November.
But the economy Trump had to make his way in as a budding property developer was Carter’s. This made the Biden years look prosperous. Stuff that cost the 30-year-old Trump $100,000 in 1976 (when Carter was elected) cost the 34-year-old Trump $150,000 in 1980 (when Carter lost re-election).
Trump’s formative experience was the Carter recession, oil shock, stagflation and a world of foreigners who seemed, to the New Yorker, complicit in US decline. This was when Trump’s world view was formed. He has varied from it hardly at all. To get Trump, we need to appreciate how he got Carter.

At this point the reptiles tried on defamation by association, Jimmy Carter with the Shah of Iran.

Then there was a final burst from the Lynch mob:

Certainly, not every Carter misstep has been met by a Trump correction. Both men, to the chagrin of foreign policy hawks, believed in peaceful coexistence with Russia. Carter was no fan of Israel. But, like Trump, he engineered a peace agreement with Arab regimes that left the world’s only Jewish state more secure. But then most US presidents of the modern era have shared these approaches.
Ultimately, what makes Trump the anti-Carter is the president-elect’s rejection of the woolly progressivism espoused by his hapless predecessor.
Carter, in good and deep faith, pushed social justice and human rights as fundamental causes of American power. Their seizure by the educated elite, and the whole woke revolution built on them, is what Trump intends to wind back.
Perhaps the crucial lesson Trump took from Carter was to be lucky. It is hard to contrive a less auspicious period of modern history in which to be a one-term president. Carter was a poor leader but he got bum luck. Until Covid, Trump was the luckiest president since Bill Clinton. He will hope this luck returns in a second term – and Iran will hope it doesn’t.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne and author of In the Shadow of the Cold War: US Foreign Policy from George Bush Sr to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

By the end of it all, the pond felt a surprising amount of affection for Carter. 

A genuine Xian, he did his best in troubled times. Neither the tangerine tyrant, nor the University of Melbourne, has that sort of excuse to hand.

Instead, for all the Lynch mob's blather, the already exploding shit show looms in the mind ...

And so to a bonus contender, with the pond astonished to see this in the lizard Oz pages, Ireland’s sympathy for Palestinians is not ‘Israelophobia’, Those who are quickest to proclaim ‘anti-Semitism’ against critics of Israel are often the same as those complaining of the left’s proclivity to close down free speech by shouting ‘racist’.

It was a four minute read, according to the reptiles, and the pond saw Ronan McDonald's effort as some sort of attempt to redeem the University of Melbourne's reputation, routinely sullied whenever the Lynch mob strolls into the public square to bung on a lynching. 

The opening snap, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar speaks at a campaign rally in Or Yehuda, Israel, hardly prepared the pond for what was to follow.

As the pond plunged in, it began to feel like the same sort of new year prank as had been performed by Imre's captions:

Israel’s closure of its embassy in Dublin last month, in response to pro-Palestinian actions by the Irish government, has led many commentators to accuse Ireland of Israelophobia and even anti-Semitism. We are hearing suggestions that Ireland has a particularly noxious history of this ancient hatred, a bigotry that has survived the collapse of its erstwhile Catholicism (“Why Ireland’s ‘new morality’ thrives on Israelophobia”, 23/12).
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, announcing the decision to close the embassy and playing to a domestic audience, declared the “anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimisation and demonisation of the Jewish state and on double standards”.
As eminent a historian as Simon Sebag Montefiore explains Ireland’s “weirdly unreasonably anti-Semitic and anti-Israel” position by pointing at the experience of his own family in the notorious 1904 Limerick boycott.
About one-third of early settlement of Australia comes from Ireland and the Irish still come here in significant numbers. If they are bringing an anti-Semitic bacillus with them, it concerns us here too – especially since both the Irish and the Jews often come here to the same places and share much. If you see someone with red hair at Bondi Junction in Sydney’s eastern suburbs it’s likely to be one group or the other.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with another snap, Ireland's Prime Minister Simon Harris.

Also at this point the pond must interrupt to note that the link in the piece, “Why Ireland’s ‘new morality’ thrives on Israelophobia”, 23/12, didn't actually work -  what a splendid new year's eve some reptiles had - but it could be found with a search, and it turned out it was referencing the Lynch mob, in exceptional Lynch mob form ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond was caught up in an epic battle between University of Melbourne dons ... food fight, food fight ...

To understand the root of the current diplomatic collapse between Ireland and Israel we would do better to look to the parallels and connections between these two diasporic peoples rather than exceptional Irish prejudice.
In the Irish case, a balanced look at modern Irish history reveals extensive solidarity and sympathy with the Jewish people and the Jewish state, at least up until the past few decades.
Let’s start with the fact Israeli President Isaac Herzog is entitled to an Irish passport. His father, the sixth president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast and reared mostly in Dublin.
The stories of the Jews and the Irish, both persecuted and scattered, intertwine around the world, especially in the US where both groups (until recently) tended towards the Democratic Party.
In the famous Battle of Cable Street in the East End of London in 1936 the Jewish and Irish residents, working together, faced down Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Irish nationalist ideas were deeply influential on early Zionism, and the Irish and Jewish independence movements were aligned across many decades. However much the memory of “Zionist Sinn Fein” may embarrass that party today, it was a historical reality.
No figure exemplifies the relationship between the two countries more than Robert Briscoe, born into an Orthodox Jewish family in South Dublin in 1894 and reared as a committed Irish republican. Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky visited Dublin for instruction from Briscoe on the use of guerrilla tactics against the British.

Yes, it was obviously an attempt by a maddened Melbourne uni academic to suggest not everyone on campus was a member of the Lynch mob.

At this point the reptiles managed another snap, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog.

The pond was still gobsmacked ...and so signed up for the history lesson ...

Briscoe was one of the founders of Ireland’s largest party, Fianna Fail, and a close friend of Eamon de Valera. Both campaigned against the partition of Israel because of the Irish experience.
We often hear about de Valera’s lamentable visit to the German legation in Ireland to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler. Less often these days do we hear about Eamon de Valera Forest outside Nazareth, dedicated in 1966 by Dublin’s Jewish community in recognition of Dev’s support for Jews in Ireland. That support includes special recognition of the Jews in Ireland’s 1937 constitution, unprecedented at the time.
Irish sympathy for persecuted Jewry goes back further. The most prominent Irish politician of the 19th century, “The Liberator” Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), was a champion of Jewish emancipation throughout Europe.
Michael Davitt, the great Land League leader and social justice advocate, exposed the Kishinev pogrom to the world in his book Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia. Davitt held that political independence for both was the only solution to the Jewish question and the Irish question.
Before he took up his role as Ireland’s first ambassador to Australia, TJ Kiernan was posted to the Holy See during World War II. There with his wife, singer Delia Murphy, and celebrated Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty, he plotted to help Jews in Rome escape from the Nazis.

To help with the history lesson, the reptiles dug deep into their archives to come up with Eamon de Valera.

On and on Ronan rambled, as the pond wandered back to the days it paid homage to its ancestor Irish folk, the ones who had fled a small village in Tipperary ...

Those old enough to remember the worldwide best-selling Jewish-American novelist Leon Uris, author of Exodus (1958) and Trinity (1976), may recall that in the 1970s and into the ’80s it was not at all uncommon for the Irish and Israeli causes to resonate together.
When did these links begin to change? Bluntly, it changed when Israel started winning. Once Israel became successful militarily and politically following the Six-Day War in 1967, Irish progressives began to identify more with the Palestinians as victims of Western “settler-colonialism”, a narrative that has been tremendously assisted by the influence of the US academy in a globalised Ireland.
The alignment with the Palestinian cause has hardened into a coarse binary, perhaps most manifest in Belfast, where nationalists swath the streets with Palestinian flags and loyalists with Israeli.
Nonetheless, when we seek to understand why Irish people in great numbers feel sympathy for the Palestinians there are far more plausible explanations than the history of Irish anti-Semitism or “blood and soil” Irish ethnic nationalism.
Probably the most obvious is the fact the Irish are reacting to the live-streamed images of horrific human suffering from Gaza. You can see that reaction as double standards, given they reacted less strenuously to horrors in Syria, Yemen and the Sudan. But “whataboutery” is not a strong moral defence. Most Irish people, like most humane people around the world, also were horrified by the footage from Hamas’s barbarity on October 7, 2023. One moral response must not cancel the other.

Well yes, there's nothing like watching a genocide unfold in real time, and as for the other conflicts, it's possible to reel away from the destruction and the despair, and not understand what drives it, while the hypocrisy of a country which purports to be a democracy is sickening.

Meanwhile, the reptiles led with another snap, a man much loved in his day by the Daily Mail, Fascist leader Oswald Mosley inspecting members of the British Union of Fascists outside the Royal Mint in London, 1935.

No doubt the Lynch mob could explain why Oswald put the tangerine tyrant in a jolly good light.

Then it was on to a final gobbet ...

If Ireland is applying double standards to Israel, as the latter alleges, the same is true in the opposite direction.
Israel maintains its embassy in South Africa, the instigator of the charge of genocide in the International Criminal Court that Ireland supported. Norway and Spain allied with Ireland back in May to recognise a Palestinian state but still retain consular relations.
Why has Israel decided to make an example of Ireland? Could it be that Israel expects of Ireland, as Ireland expects of Israel, higher standards than it does of other countries?
It’s notable that those who are the quickest to proclaim “anti-Semitism” against critics of Israel are often the same as those complaining of the left’s proclivity to close down free speech by shouting “racist”. You can criticise Ireland for naive idealism, for moral self-congratulation, for too readily taking on a progressive orthodoxy, for not listening well to its EU partners and for under-recognising the eliminationist imperialism of Israel’s adversaries.
But the idea that Ireland’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause originates in its history of Catholic nationalist anti-Semitism holds little explanatory weight.
Ronan McDonald is Gerry Higgins chair of Irish studies at the University of Melbourne.

Actually the pond sees nothing wrong with a little naïve idealism ... it surely beats the far right claptrap and malarkey that routinely emanates from the Lynch mob, ruining the reputation of the University of Melbourne in the process ...

Sheesh, fancy welcoming in the new year with the Lynch mob and a rebuttal of the Lynch mob ... about the only thing that would have been worse was spending time with Vlad the impaler and Russian state media ...

Speaking of which, this was offered in another place as vintage Wilcox, what with many cartoonists bludging their way into the new year ...

And this was Russian state media showing the Lynch mob how to do it ...