All bullshitters are liars, but very few liars are bullshitters. In Scott Morrisson it’s possible we find a rare, possibly unique example of a perverse hybrid, the bare-faced liar cross-dressing as a bullshit artist. Or words. Words are good too. In 1986, the splendidly named Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, published the prescient and revelatory essay,
Guy Rundle had a good bit in Crikey today, that you can get a sense of when I quoth it's title and sub-head in full: "COVID-19 and the normalisation of abject and unmitigated failure
This government's failure of leadership during the pandemic is the result of the Coalition's indifference to its citizens' lives and health."
I like Grey's Law here: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." But it's hard not to suspect the presence of actual malice too.
There's also the limitless smaller failings. Why out-source the covid vaccine rollout to one of the big consulting firms, that have never done that sort of thing before, when there's a whole actual public health infrastructure already on the ground that could have done it? Why spend another 600Mil on a gas power station that the experts say is unnecessary, in a place that doesn't have a gas supply? Why indeed...
My greatest fear is he doesn’t give a fuck about 99% of the shit he pulls because it’s all a gaslit smokescreen from some truly evil fundy prosperity Pentecostal life-hating rapture-embracing shitfuckery 1% that will cause multigenerational damage at the very least and Armageddon at worst. But I spose I’m just feeling pessimistic.
You have summed up this govt's strategy for most things and the help that the Murdoch media provides- in such a way that I can't imagine a better more accurate run of words
"He doesn’t care that you know. He just has to convince a certain number of tradies that Albo will force them to give up their utes for battery powered poofter cars and he’ll be right."
"only to wake in fright years later, afeared that the endless twitching of his knob in the dark is a convulsive recoil away from the serrated kitchen knife of payback."
Sir, this is one of the finest pieces of prose that I've ever read.
When you die, we shall ensure that a small monument is built for you. ;)
It’s hard to imagine looking back on the days of Little Johnny or the Mad Monk and thinking “look at all that competence and transparency” but here we the fuck are
Gosh, it's totally impossible for me to think that!
Howard watered down the rules re: Ministerial standards. Also lied about children overboard to win 99 election. Set up middle class welfare system that's unaffordable & entrenches inequality. Divisive dog whistler re: refugees & asylum seekers, Muslim communities, unemployed, unions. Refused to apologise to First Nations peoples for genocide & stolen generations; characterised dojng that as "black armband view of history", changed Australia Day to date that Indigenous ppl view as Invasion Day, promoted flag waving nationalism, opened detention centres in remote areas like Woomera & northen WA, changed Family Law Act after consulting MRA groups,
Allowed Patricks Stevedores to use SAS in a union busting exercise.
Plus - TAMPA, Seiv X, AWB scandal, bugged Timor govt, Timor Gap ripoff, Operation Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau, Dr Haneef, Workchoices.
Abbott lied his way into govt, cut everything, King of rorts, indefinite detention of asylum seekers & refugees, boat turnarounds & deaths kept secret, Orange 'lifeboats', Save the Children scandal, "shit happens", women doing the ironing, onion eating photo op, Knights & Dames...
Surplus from mining boom wasted, and corruption, incompetence, misogyny, racism, lack of transparency, militarism obsessed, secrecy & spite all became features of LNP under Howard & his junkyard dog.
Apologies for this reply if it's a bit OTT and you were just kidding 🙄
I was just joking. But you make very good points. My old man is 75 and says he’s never seen a PM as bad as Howard but Abbot was a close run second. But this mob have a list of crimes and rorts as long as my arm as well. I think what pushes me over the edge is 2 things: the fact that Scotty will not, under any circumstances, fire anyone, and that he turns his back on the Opposition when they speak. I dunno, at least Abbot and Howard were traditional Tory Conservatives - I hated what they did but I mostly understood their reasons for doing it. With this bloke the cruelty is a feature not a bug.
. aaand “battery powered poofter cars” wins the Internet this week. Apart from being viscerally funny it’s true. Pork barrel the tradies, win the votes.
Given how reality's a tad too enervating (and so absurdly overwhelmingly surreal), I can simply concur with how kinda brill this week's column is.. and with zilch brain fog in evidence, too.
You're in damn fine form, allora grazie! (Back to weird torpor here, bit like fave Billie Holiday song)
Being guided by god means you don't need any bread and circuses or shiny baubbles and trinkets, although Tony with a cockscomb could substitute for a clown that could distract the serfs and kulaks enough to bang through some quasi legal legislation in the dead of night. I drove past the Horizon Church in Sutherland the other day and I saw a lightening rod on the roof, I thought to myself what do they need that for when they have Scotty as a member.
Comedians have a team who write jokes for the next performance. The prime ministers office have a team of News Corp staff who write a list of lies for the next week. The list covers a whole gamet of scenarios along with a list of current ministers who he can deflect any dangerous questions towards, of course the relevant minister will have instructed his staff not to answer the phone for the rest of the day or until the next news cycle comes along.
As we move into the era where lying is the new truth and fact is actually fiction because dystopia becomes normality we all look towards a saviour who can lead us to a sunlit shangrila, but when the miasma clears it's actually a commuter car park next to Engadine Macca's.
Some research should be done to see if the more pios a prime minister is the bigger the lie he can pull off, a pie chart or a graph could plot the trajectory verses the gullability of the average tabloid reader and the time between the next lie and the page three girl.
It has recently been discovered that Morry from marketing has got the idea for his disingenuous deceit from his long time bestie who is the big Kahuna of the Cronulla branch of QAnon, his right hand man is a Mr Craig Kelly the mendacious local member, his door is open any time. If he's not there you can find him on the Alan Jones propaganda hour where Craig is Jonsey's hand puppet.
They have a swag of facts and figures, charts and graphs and some of the finest perfidiously fallacious undisputable gospel of certitude but only available on Sky News.
I wonder if any of you statisticians out there in the interworld could compile the number of lies that Scotty has told in the last four years compared to the grand master of duplicitousness, the ole Trumpster himself. Most reputable fact checkers put the number at 30,573, give or take a fib or two, over 4 years, if you could break that down to a lie every hour, day, week, month and year we could make a graph or pie chart for a power point presentation to show at the Young Liberals branch meetings as a training video.
I always thought that Pauline Hanson was a figment of my imagination, but she's a real person ! What is wrong with the world if someone like that can exist ?
Catastro-fucking-muntedly-incompetent…brand new phrase for our mine site workshop!
Love ya work, true wordsmith
Guy Rundle had a good bit in Crikey today, that you can get a sense of when I quoth it's title and sub-head in full: "COVID-19 and the normalisation of abject and unmitigated failure
This government's failure of leadership during the pandemic is the result of the Coalition's indifference to its citizens' lives and health."
I like Grey's Law here: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." But it's hard not to suspect the presence of actual malice too.
There's also the limitless smaller failings. Why out-source the covid vaccine rollout to one of the big consulting firms, that have never done that sort of thing before, when there's a whole actual public health infrastructure already on the ground that could have done it? Why spend another 600Mil on a gas power station that the experts say is unnecessary, in a place that doesn't have a gas supply? Why indeed...
My greatest fear is he doesn’t give a fuck about 99% of the shit he pulls because it’s all a gaslit smokescreen from some truly evil fundy prosperity Pentecostal life-hating rapture-embracing shitfuckery 1% that will cause multigenerational damage at the very least and Armageddon at worst. But I spose I’m just feeling pessimistic.
A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist mate
You have summed up this govt's strategy for most things and the help that the Murdoch media provides- in such a way that I can't imagine a better more accurate run of words
"He doesn’t care that you know. He just has to convince a certain number of tradies that Albo will force them to give up their utes for battery powered poofter cars and he’ll be right."
However, have you seen the grins on the tradies'faces when they plant the foot in the Tesla?
"only to wake in fright years later, afeared that the endless twitching of his knob in the dark is a convulsive recoil away from the serrated kitchen knife of payback."
Sir, this is one of the finest pieces of prose that I've ever read.
When you die, we shall ensure that a small monument is built for you. ;)
It’s hard to imagine looking back on the days of Little Johnny or the Mad Monk and thinking “look at all that competence and transparency” but here we the fuck are
Gosh, it's totally impossible for me to think that!
Howard watered down the rules re: Ministerial standards. Also lied about children overboard to win 99 election. Set up middle class welfare system that's unaffordable & entrenches inequality. Divisive dog whistler re: refugees & asylum seekers, Muslim communities, unemployed, unions. Refused to apologise to First Nations peoples for genocide & stolen generations; characterised dojng that as "black armband view of history", changed Australia Day to date that Indigenous ppl view as Invasion Day, promoted flag waving nationalism, opened detention centres in remote areas like Woomera & northen WA, changed Family Law Act after consulting MRA groups,
Allowed Patricks Stevedores to use SAS in a union busting exercise.
Plus - TAMPA, Seiv X, AWB scandal, bugged Timor govt, Timor Gap ripoff, Operation Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau, Dr Haneef, Workchoices.
Abbott lied his way into govt, cut everything, King of rorts, indefinite detention of asylum seekers & refugees, boat turnarounds & deaths kept secret, Orange 'lifeboats', Save the Children scandal, "shit happens", women doing the ironing, onion eating photo op, Knights & Dames...
Surplus from mining boom wasted, and corruption, incompetence, misogyny, racism, lack of transparency, militarism obsessed, secrecy & spite all became features of LNP under Howard & his junkyard dog.
Apologies for this reply if it's a bit OTT and you were just kidding 🙄
I was just joking. But you make very good points. My old man is 75 and says he’s never seen a PM as bad as Howard but Abbot was a close run second. But this mob have a list of crimes and rorts as long as my arm as well. I think what pushes me over the edge is 2 things: the fact that Scotty will not, under any circumstances, fire anyone, and that he turns his back on the Opposition when they speak. I dunno, at least Abbot and Howard were traditional Tory Conservatives - I hated what they did but I mostly understood their reasons for doing it. With this bloke the cruelty is a feature not a bug.
I once overheard an old bushie say “I’ve shot dogs with more leadership than John Howard.”
. aaand “battery powered poofter cars” wins the Internet this week. Apart from being viscerally funny it’s true. Pork barrel the tradies, win the votes.
This government makes me feel physically ill, and the surrounding miasma of propagandist fog that our Murdock media only sickens me further.
Given how reality's a tad too enervating (and so absurdly overwhelmingly surreal), I can simply concur with how kinda brill this week's column is.. and with zilch brain fog in evidence, too.
You're in damn fine form, allora grazie! (Back to weird torpor here, bit like fave Billie Holiday song)
Nailed it, as usual, JB
Brain Fog? We better buckle up for when the fog lifts. As the ship goes down I hope you're there play us out JB.
As I've said many times in the past, Howard is a liar, and Abbott is a bullshitter.
I think you're right about SQoMo - he's somewhere in between.
Being guided by god means you don't need any bread and circuses or shiny baubbles and trinkets, although Tony with a cockscomb could substitute for a clown that could distract the serfs and kulaks enough to bang through some quasi legal legislation in the dead of night. I drove past the Horizon Church in Sutherland the other day and I saw a lightening rod on the roof, I thought to myself what do they need that for when they have Scotty as a member.
Comedians have a team who write jokes for the next performance. The prime ministers office have a team of News Corp staff who write a list of lies for the next week. The list covers a whole gamet of scenarios along with a list of current ministers who he can deflect any dangerous questions towards, of course the relevant minister will have instructed his staff not to answer the phone for the rest of the day or until the next news cycle comes along.
As we move into the era where lying is the new truth and fact is actually fiction because dystopia becomes normality we all look towards a saviour who can lead us to a sunlit shangrila, but when the miasma clears it's actually a commuter car park next to Engadine Macca's.
Some research should be done to see if the more pios a prime minister is the bigger the lie he can pull off, a pie chart or a graph could plot the trajectory verses the gullability of the average tabloid reader and the time between the next lie and the page three girl.
It has recently been discovered that Morry from marketing has got the idea for his disingenuous deceit from his long time bestie who is the big Kahuna of the Cronulla branch of QAnon, his right hand man is a Mr Craig Kelly the mendacious local member, his door is open any time. If he's not there you can find him on the Alan Jones propaganda hour where Craig is Jonsey's hand puppet.
They have a swag of facts and figures, charts and graphs and some of the finest perfidiously fallacious undisputable gospel of certitude but only available on Sky News.
I wonder if any of you statisticians out there in the interworld could compile the number of lies that Scotty has told in the last four years compared to the grand master of duplicitousness, the ole Trumpster himself. Most reputable fact checkers put the number at 30,573, give or take a fib or two, over 4 years, if you could break that down to a lie every hour, day, week, month and year we could make a graph or pie chart for a power point presentation to show at the Young Liberals branch meetings as a training video.
I always thought that Pauline Hanson was a figment of my imagination, but she's a real person ! What is wrong with the world if someone like that can exist ?
I lost my job this week. First smirk I've had since Tuesday. Thanks.
Now for your considered opinion about Gladys Berejiklian, please. The Master's Apprentice, so to speak. :)