1,769 thoughts on “Open Thread – Weekend 17 Dec 2022”
bi partisan
Stacked with maaaaaaaaaaates and a token maaaaaaaaaate with a different-coloured tie pinned on.
Electoral kryptonite too, if you were to ask Liz Cheney in a vulnerable moment…*
*And no Cats, I am not volunteering to face the Peril. There are not enough paper bags and volumes of booze-a-hol in existence. And her father might just ‘accidentally‘ a shotgun at me.
#BaLaNcE
1
Feck. Page turn.
Ignominy…
The poll has finished and Musk lost bigly.
Smart money’s on Jared Kushner to run twitter.
2
Sort of trending atm here, Thai corvette foundered last night in Gulf of Thailand. As much as some prayers would help I don’t hold hope for the 31 missing crew.
Wearing a uniform comes with risks no matter how developed a nation is. One of my hosts uncles did national service in the Navy.
10
The poll has finished and Musk lost bigly.
Smart money’s on Jared Kushner to run twitter.
Gotta be Trump; or a Trump.
3
I doubt Elon ever asks questions that he hasn’t got a good idea of what the answer is. The man is an inventor of sorts, but more than that, an ideas man, a problem solver and if he isn’t sure of the answer he knows who will. You don’t do what he has done with Space X in such a short time if you can’t solve problems. Does anyone really think Twitter for F**ks sake would interest him for long. I think he sees it as a money spinner, and as JC alluded to as vehicle to develop into something useful in the entertainment industry.
5
Even if you treat the purchase of Twitter as a Trump-style disruption of a comfy oligarchy, then it has done its job.
9
Capitalism does not survive big oligarchies for long.
Competition is healthy, no matter what Big Money, Big Corporate or Big Gummint say.
2
2 hours ago
Keep ceremonies on January 26: Price
Laura Placella
LAURA PLACELLA
Indigenous Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says she hopes local councils do not “jump on the bandwagon” and shift their citizenship ceremonies from January 26 because they will be disappointing migrants who have chosen to become Australian citizens.
On Friday, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles announced that local councils will no longer be forced to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, with Labor overturning rules introduced in 2019 by former prime minister Scott Morrison.
Senator Price, speaking on Sky News, said it would be an “insult” to migrant communities if they were prevented from becoming a citizen on Australia Day.
“As former Deputy Mayor of Alice Springs, Australia is always known for the most popular day of the year for new Australians to hold their citizenship ceremony, to pledge their loyalty, their allegiance, to this nation and (shifting the date of the ceremony) would absolutely ruin it for the many migrant Australians who have made this place their home,” she said.
It remains to be seen how many local councils across the country will follow in the footsteps of the Yarra and Darebin councils in Melbourne, who voted to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day back in 2017.
Senator Price also criticised Channel 10, after its chief content officer Beverley McGarvey last week panned Australia Day as “not a day of celebration” in an internal note sent to her key programming and editorial staff.
“I couldn’t think of a more out-of-touch, completely and utterly removed TV station than Channel 10,” Senator Price said.
“I’m sick to death of all these privileged individuals … who have decided what’s best for us all and to assume that as a race … Indigenous Australians all think the same and view ourselves as victims. I think it’s really denigrating, removes our agency and it suggests, of course, that they know what’s best for us and our needs. It’s disgusting. I’m done with it.”
12
Musk buying twitter is second only to Trump’s presidency in exposing the deep state and making lefties’ heads spin. The only win we’ve had in two years. No doubt he will leave in good hands.
8
Cuteness overload here so get the sick buckets ready.
Took the little chap to the pool this arvo and spotted a swallow floundering in the deep end. Used to seeing them dive and skim the surface of the pool for a drink but this one was nearly cactus.
Got the little bloke to fish it out with my hat and got a great pic of him pleased as punch with his rescued bird.
Put the bird over in the sun to dry off and it was gone when we had finished the swim.
/ smug father of a future vet….
23
Harry and Meghan self-pity marathon proves leftism is only for the rich
Nauseating, hypocritical, narcissistic and unimaginably wealthy: Harry and Meghan’s racism claims are the ultimate bastardiation of anything good the left had to offer, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Of all the questions that have emerged from Harry and Meghan’s ultra-marathon of self-pity, there is one that has been particularly haunting me: Why do I care?
Sure, they are nauseating, hypocritical, narcissistic, disingenuous and unimaginably wealthy, despite no discernible skills or talent, but this is hardly unique to them. You could probably put 10 per cent of Californians and half the Teals in the same category.
And that is the answer.
As someone who grew up poor and was always raised and educated in the belief that the Left side of politics was about helping the poor, the spectacle of Harry and Meghan is grotesque not just because of who they are, but what they prove.
And that is the sad and evermore intractable fact that left-wing politics has become a plaything for the rich.
What was once a contest for the freedom of slaves and advancement of workers is now a contest for who can claim the most invisible and nonsensical oppression.
And so the cause of the masses has been hijacked by the complaints of millionaires.
The evidence is everywhere, but let’s just start with H&M and work our way down.
The most watertight vessel for bullshit oppression is identity politics, and it is no coincidence that it is this ideology the modern upper-middle-class left climbs into like a liferaft at the mildest sign of a storm.
Thus Harry and Meghan have spent years hanging out their shingle on the claim that Meghan was unforgivably racially vilified because of an alleged musing by an unidentified royal in a private conversation about what their baby might look like.
Notwithstanding the fact that literally billions of families over the course of human history have speculated what babies could grow up to resemble – nor that the questioner was probably just hoping it wasn’t a ranga – even if such a comment was laced with such racist malice it would rank probably in the bottom 0.2 per cent of the world’s known problems.
Possibly lower if you count Africa, ironically enough. But there we have it. A couple that says someone from the British royal family might have been mean to them at a tea party once gets a $US100m Netflix deal to complain about racism. Cool.
This is the ultimate bastardisation of the Left – that the concept of underprivilege could be usurped by incredibly overprivileged people lamenting that despite all their privilege they are still not as privileged as those above them.
Thus Harry complains that he wasn’t treated as well as William and Meghan complains that she wasn’t treated as well as Kate. And all this is supposedly in the name of equality.
Yet it is no different to the attitude of Harry and Meghan’s new friends in Hollywood, where it has become fashionable to compare the pay of male and female co-stars in order to gauge how progressive a film or filmmaker might be.
A female lead might complain about getting, say, $15m while her male counterpart pocketed $20m. Is that unfair? Probably. Are either of them oppressed? Probably not.
In Australia, we recently saw the perplexing spectacle of a multi-millionaire female chief executive of a publicly owned company being targeted by Labor for handing out Cartier watches to her fellow executives, only to have her then cast as a victim of sexism when she was fired as a result.
This was, needless to say, somewhat confusing for all involved.
So far, so funny. But the bourgeoisie’s shameless overthrow of the class that was once supposed to overthrow them also has tragic consequences in the real world.
Consider the Covid pandemic, during which affluent and outspoken elites with enormous political power and social media reach demanded restrictions on the masses – overwhelmingly in the name of
so-called “progressive” politics.
Lockdowns were called for by those with the biggest houses while the poorest were holed up in their flats for weeks and months on end.
White-collar workers who could Zoom all day embraced the home revolution while blue-collar workers either had their jobs wiped out or were sent to the frontline.
And the children of those most educated and available were able to continue online learning while the most at-risk kids silently disappeared.
As reality and the Shergold inquiry have shown, this ideological campaign was almost entirely factually wrong and its effects were profoundly destructive to the most poor and vulnerable in our society.
And it was all driven pretty much exclusively by wealthy left-wingers. Little wonder the working-class voters of Melbourne swung against Dan Andrews while upper-middle-class seats swung towards him.
This is the real inconvenient truth the so-called progressive side of politics has to face: Wealthy leftists have stolen what was once the domain of the working class.
But the resurgence of the Labor Right under the unassailable – albeit shamelessly isolationist – Mark McGowan, SA’s pro-nuclear Peter Malinauskas and NSW’s sensible Chris Minns gives hope that genuine defenders of the aspirational working class are rising again.
The rich have stolen the Left. But, to quote the quintessentially woke rock god Bono: We’re stealing it back.
11
The rich have stolen the Left. But, to quote the quintessentially woke rock god Bono: We’re stealing it back.
good luck with that idea
woke is a utopian post-logic secular religion.
10
Anyway, “Sliante ” to you mob. Drinking good single malt, and watching Richard Sharpe
“There are ladies present. That being so, I would have thought there were also gentlemen present.”
WE all know in our heart of hearts that Harold Markle is a slightly dim but fun-loving chin who flew Apache helicopter gunships in Afghanistan and cavorted around Las Vegas hotel rooms with naked hookers.
But then along came Meghan, who obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.
And now it seems that she has her arm so far up his bottom, she can use her fingers to alter his facial expressions.
I actually feel rather sorry for him because today he’s just a glove puppet with no more control over what he says or does than Basil Brush.
That makes me even angrier. Can’t they see everything that’s happening is so very obviously pre-planned.
Leave the UK. Blame the royals. Do an interview with Oprah.
Get Basil Brush to write a book. Do a Netflix series — which should have been called A Woman, Talking Bollocks.
I can see it clearly. The studied pauses. The mock incredulity.
And the B-movie, soap-actress, quivery-voiced, more-in-sorrow-than-anger stories that are so obviously claptrap.
Do you really think she would have entertained a move to New Zealand? That’s 13 hours away from everything.
And I can tell you, with absolute certainty, what’s coming next.
Harold’s Spare book will be released.
Then she’ll do one called I Think I May Be God. And then she’ll have exhausted the whole royal thing — so will be off.
We will see Diana-style photographs of her, all on her own, outside the Taj Mahal.
And then she will be pictured gazing into the middle distance, on the back of a playboy’s superyacht and will marry a tech billionaire and they’ll have a child called something vomitty like Peace. Or Truth.
Or Love.
Harold, meanwhile, will be stuck in California with no friends, either there or here, no family to support him and an army of young girls who’ll believe Meghan’s story that the marriage break-up was all his fault because he’s, like, you know, sooooo a man.
And the Royal Family?
She’s going to damage them — be in no doubt about that.
Because one day soon, my generation will all be dead, and we will be replaced by a new bunch who are growing up believing that Charles and William and Co are bullies who are waited on hand and foot by slaves, eunuchs and spin doctors.
Unless, of course, when Meghan takes her hand out of the ginger glove puppet, he remembers who he is and gives us “the” truth.
I’m not sure most readers would be ready for that. I would struggle and I’ve still got my Salmon stubbies, although there are fewer occasions I can get them out.
Move over Mavis, Luigi gives The Great Man a tongue bath in today’s Paywallian. Is it the Wong time?
Stacked with maaaaaaaaaaates and a token maaaaaaaaaate with a different-coloured tie pinned on.
Electoral kryptonite too, if you were to ask Liz Cheney in a vulnerable moment…*
*And no Cats, I am not volunteering to face the Peril. There are not enough paper bags and volumes of booze-a-hol in existence. And her father might just ‘accidentally‘ a shotgun at me.
#BaLaNcE
Feck. Page turn.
Ignominy…
The poll has finished and Musk lost bigly.
Smart money’s on Jared Kushner to run twitter.
Sort of trending atm here, Thai corvette foundered last night in Gulf of Thailand. As much as some prayers would help I don’t hold hope for the 31 missing crew.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2463789/navy-ship-sinks-in-storm-31-sailors-missing
Wearing a uniform comes with risks no matter how developed a nation is. One of my hosts uncles did national service in the Navy.
The poll has finished and Musk lost bigly.
Smart money’s on Jared Kushner to run twitter.
Gotta be Trump; or a Trump.
I doubt Elon ever asks questions that he hasn’t got a good idea of what the answer is. The man is an inventor of sorts, but more than that, an ideas man, a problem solver and if he isn’t sure of the answer he knows who will. You don’t do what he has done with Space X in such a short time if you can’t solve problems. Does anyone really think Twitter for F**ks sake would interest him for long. I think he sees it as a money spinner, and as JC alluded to as vehicle to develop into something useful in the entertainment industry.
Even if you treat the purchase of Twitter as a Trump-style disruption of a comfy oligarchy, then it has done its job.
Capitalism does not survive big oligarchies for long.
Competition is healthy, no matter what Big Money, Big Corporate or Big Gummint say.
Musk buying twitter is second only to Trump’s presidency in exposing the deep state and making lefties’ heads spin. The only win we’ve had in two years. No doubt he will leave in good hands.
Cuteness overload here so get the sick buckets ready.
Took the little chap to the pool this arvo and spotted a swallow floundering in the deep end. Used to seeing them dive and skim the surface of the pool for a drink but this one was nearly cactus.
Got the little bloke to fish it out with my hat and got a great pic of him pleased as punch with his rescued bird.
Put the bird over in the sun to dry off and it was gone when we had finished the swim.
/ smug father of a future vet….
Harry and Meghan self-pity marathon proves leftism is only for the rich
Nauseating, hypocritical, narcissistic and unimaginably wealthy: Harry and Meghan’s racism claims are the ultimate bastardiation of anything good the left had to offer, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Of all the questions that have emerged from Harry and Meghan’s ultra-marathon of self-pity, there is one that has been particularly haunting me: Why do I care?
Sure, they are nauseating, hypocritical, narcissistic, disingenuous and unimaginably wealthy, despite no discernible skills or talent, but this is hardly unique to them. You could probably put 10 per cent of Californians and half the Teals in the same category.
And that is the answer.
As someone who grew up poor and was always raised and educated in the belief that the Left side of politics was about helping the poor, the spectacle of Harry and Meghan is grotesque not just because of who they are, but what they prove.
And that is the sad and evermore intractable fact that left-wing politics has become a plaything for the rich.
What was once a contest for the freedom of slaves and advancement of workers is now a contest for who can claim the most invisible and nonsensical oppression.
And so the cause of the masses has been hijacked by the complaints of millionaires.
The evidence is everywhere, but let’s just start with H&M and work our way down.
The most watertight vessel for bullshit oppression is identity politics, and it is no coincidence that it is this ideology the modern upper-middle-class left climbs into like a liferaft at the mildest sign of a storm.
Thus Harry and Meghan have spent years hanging out their shingle on the claim that Meghan was unforgivably racially vilified because of an alleged musing by an unidentified royal in a private conversation about what their baby might look like.
Notwithstanding the fact that literally billions of families over the course of human history have speculated what babies could grow up to resemble – nor that the questioner was probably just hoping it wasn’t a ranga – even if such a comment was laced with such racist malice it would rank probably in the bottom 0.2 per cent of the world’s known problems.
Possibly lower if you count Africa, ironically enough. But there we have it. A couple that says someone from the British royal family might have been mean to them at a tea party once gets a $US100m Netflix deal to complain about racism. Cool.
This is the ultimate bastardisation of the Left – that the concept of underprivilege could be usurped by incredibly overprivileged people lamenting that despite all their privilege they are still not as privileged as those above them.
Thus Harry complains that he wasn’t treated as well as William and Meghan complains that she wasn’t treated as well as Kate. And all this is supposedly in the name of equality.
Yet it is no different to the attitude of Harry and Meghan’s new friends in Hollywood, where it has become fashionable to compare the pay of male and female co-stars in order to gauge how progressive a film or filmmaker might be.
A female lead might complain about getting, say, $15m while her male counterpart pocketed $20m. Is that unfair? Probably. Are either of them oppressed? Probably not.
In Australia, we recently saw the perplexing spectacle of a multi-millionaire female chief executive of a publicly owned company being targeted by Labor for handing out Cartier watches to her fellow executives, only to have her then cast as a victim of sexism when she was fired as a result.
This was, needless to say, somewhat confusing for all involved.
So far, so funny. But the bourgeoisie’s shameless overthrow of the class that was once supposed to overthrow them also has tragic consequences in the real world.
Consider the Covid pandemic, during which affluent and outspoken elites with enormous political power and social media reach demanded restrictions on the masses – overwhelmingly in the name of
so-called “progressive” politics.
Lockdowns were called for by those with the biggest houses while the poorest were holed up in their flats for weeks and months on end.
White-collar workers who could Zoom all day embraced the home revolution while blue-collar workers either had their jobs wiped out or were sent to the frontline.
And the children of those most educated and available were able to continue online learning while the most at-risk kids silently disappeared.
As reality and the Shergold inquiry have shown, this ideological campaign was almost entirely factually wrong and its effects were profoundly destructive to the most poor and vulnerable in our society.
And it was all driven pretty much exclusively by wealthy left-wingers. Little wonder the working-class voters of Melbourne swung against Dan Andrews while upper-middle-class seats swung towards him.
This is the real inconvenient truth the so-called progressive side of politics has to face: Wealthy leftists have stolen what was once the domain of the working class.
But the resurgence of the Labor Right under the unassailable – albeit shamelessly isolationist – Mark McGowan, SA’s pro-nuclear Peter Malinauskas and NSW’s sensible Chris Minns gives hope that genuine defenders of the aspirational working class are rising again.
The rich have stolen the Left. But, to quote the quintessentially woke rock god Bono: We’re stealing it back.
good luck with that idea
woke is a utopian post-logic secular religion.
Anyway, “Sliante ” to you mob. Drinking good single malt, and watching Richard Sharpe
“There are ladies present. That being so, I would have thought there were also gentlemen present.”
JEREMY CLARKSON One day, Harold the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking B*****ks
Jeremy Clarkson
WE all know in our heart of hearts that Harold Markle is a slightly dim but fun-loving chin who flew Apache helicopter gunships in Afghanistan and cavorted around Las Vegas hotel rooms with naked hookers.
But then along came Meghan, who obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.
And now it seems that she has her arm so far up his bottom, she can use her fingers to alter his facial expressions.
I actually feel rather sorry for him because today he’s just a glove puppet with no more control over what he says or does than Basil Brush.
That makes me even angrier. Can’t they see everything that’s happening is so very obviously pre-planned.
Leave the UK. Blame the royals. Do an interview with Oprah.
Get Basil Brush to write a book. Do a Netflix series — which should have been called A Woman, Talking Bollocks.
I can see it clearly. The studied pauses. The mock incredulity.
And the B-movie, soap-actress, quivery-voiced, more-in-sorrow-than-anger stories that are so obviously claptrap.
Do you really think she would have entertained a move to New Zealand? That’s 13 hours away from everything.
And I can tell you, with absolute certainty, what’s coming next.
Harold’s Spare book will be released.
Then she’ll do one called I Think I May Be God. And then she’ll have exhausted the whole royal thing — so will be off.
We will see Diana-style photographs of her, all on her own, outside the Taj Mahal.
And then she will be pictured gazing into the middle distance, on the back of a playboy’s superyacht and will marry a tech billionaire and they’ll have a child called something vomitty like Peace. Or Truth.
Or Love.
Harold, meanwhile, will be stuck in California with no friends, either there or here, no family to support him and an army of young girls who’ll believe Meghan’s story that the marriage break-up was all his fault because he’s, like, you know, sooooo a man.
And the Royal Family?
She’s going to damage them — be in no doubt about that.
Because one day soon, my generation will all be dead, and we will be replaced by a new bunch who are growing up believing that Charles and William and Co are bullies who are waited on hand and foot by slaves, eunuchs and spin doctors.
Unless, of course, when Meghan takes her hand out of the ginger glove puppet, he remembers who he is and gives us “the” truth.
Not hers.
Eleven years now
In joint raid, Kurdish forces seize IS militant in Syria
A Kurdish-led group in Syria says its fighters with U.S. help have arrested a wanted militant with the Islamic State group that continues to stage attacks in the region
Delta A
19 Dec at 6.03 – I will try to help.
Playford to Dunstan in on swoop
I’m not sure most readers would be ready for that. I would struggle and I’ve still got my Salmon stubbies, although there are fewer occasions I can get them out.
Move over Mavis, Luigi gives The Great Man a tongue bath in today’s Paywallian. Is it the Wong time?