Deathcult: Shit-posting as a service!

The Return of Alien Side Boob

(JB’s special note to you: Just excuse me while I tweak and repost this bad boy as a new entry. I’m still learning this CMS.)

I don’t know why people thought the venerable house of Fairfax would have trouble adapting to its new life as a line item in the Nine Network’s incidentals budget—you know, hair plugs, Botox, legacy print media—because it’s taken no time at all to turn the editorial columns of the Herald and The Age into a heaving cum dumpster, brimful of the IPA’s dankest money shots.

It wasn’t so surprising when the Fin Review came out in favour of killing your grandmother with COVID-19 if it meant making a killing when the All Ords bounced back. But the sudden crunching cadence of so many pundits all goose-stepping towards grannycide in the Fin’s sibling mastheads was some deeply mysterious shitfuckery. A riddle to rival the question of how Pete Evans has eluded the giant novelty butterfly net for so long.

But not much of a riddle.

With Evans, it’s the power of activated almonds. With the news media, it’s a collapsing business model. Revenue cratered a long time before the coronavirus started eating into management bonuses, so it was time to cut some motherfuckers at the Ninefax Deathstar. Casuals, freelancers, executive salaries.

Yeah, okay. Just casuals and freelancers then. Another tranche were quietly shit-canned this week. It’s hard to know how many contributors got pushed out of the airlock because freelancers, like grandparents, don’t count. But unsurprisingly the question of replacing the content they provided did arise. Less surprisingly, it was an open question for only so long as it took to insert a massive lump of bituminous coal into Chris Uhlmann’s rear power port where a sudden burst of thermal energy generated by the intense pressure of Uhlmann’s inhumanly strong rectal clench powered up to eight hundred words of top shelf word-typing.

To be fair, peak Uhlmann is butthurt Uhlmann tweeting about how mean everybody on Twitter is to him, but his Throw Grandma Under The Train bit on Tuesday was a keening cry from the heart of a man who just wanted your much-loved but mostly unproductive older relatives to “be free to roam where they please” — presumably even if that meant being free to roam into a makeshift triage facility in the carpark of Westmead Hospital, where they could die, hacking up bloody shreds of ruptured lung tissue.

They could be content, however, that “we live in a democracy,” and they got to make “an informed choice,” at least according to Nine’s galaxy brain political editor.

Unfortunately, even a commodious buttplug of Australia’s highest quality thermal coal was not quite energy dense enough to fully power Chris’s word-typing efforts, and he never got around to typing any words about how everybody infected by this Ayn Rand fan wank might exercise their freedom of choice not to be infected and die horribly.

Still, it was only Tuesday.

The Fin’s editorial cabal had yet to start stroking their intellectual murder boners, but that didn’t take long, with indie economist Sam Lovick doing the math.

And the math was sexy! If you’re a Dalek.

Did you know, for instance, that you can save billions of dollars in national wealth (also known as rich people’s share portfolios) by killing just a few thousand grandparents? And any misgivings you might entertain would surely be mollified by the marvellous fun to be had screaming “Exterminate! Exterminate!” in a warbling metallic battle roar as you rolled through the carpark at Westmead Hospital putting the zap on a horde of economically worthless wrinklies with your head-mounted toilet plunger deathray.

Need I go on?

Because Pro Goward did.

By the time she clutched her pearls in Thursday’s Sydney Morning Herald emoting in favour of herd immunity, a strategy she also conceded was, er, ‘discredited’, it was almost as though there was an editorial line, running directly from rapidly shrinking media revenue streams to sexy Dalek cosplay in the hospital carpark.

Like the sudden revelation that real estate agents were not your friends, COVID-19 offered an epiphany of sorts about wealth and power.

Uhlmann, again:

“An honest assessment of the balance sheet is that the disease, mostly, threatens older Australians and the cure is falling like a hammer on the young. This is profoundly unfair.”

But a starker assessment is that an economic system predicated on the impoverishment of millions for the benefit of a few was always going to demand that the many sacrifice themselves for the few because that is how the system was designed to work.

The disparity in sacrifice didn’t bother these fuckmuppets nearly as much when it applied to, say, taxation policy during the last election. The cost of franking credits and negative gearing also falls mostly on the young, but I struggle to recall the Daleks screaming to exterminate them.