Complicity

If you haven’t heard, the F-35 is an expensive death plane used, most recently, to erase Gaza from existence...

Australia sells parts used in its construction, including the release mechanism that allows the bomb bay doors to open and rain death on playgrounds, schools, mosques, etc., whatever depravity this Nazified racist shithole is up to on any given day...

F-35s don’t have other purposes... F-35s – inoperable without Australia’s contribution – have been used to blow up anything resembling life in Palestine. This means that if F-35s had cup holders they’d be lethal cup holders because keeping a genocidal dickweed hydrated is all part of it.

...

Wong is applying the same specious neoliberal reasoning that “means” the coal Australia digs from the ground, sells, and burns elsewhere doesn’t count towards our global emissions. It might be “true” in the benignly villainous world of corporate bookkeeping, but in reality it is just homicidal hoodwinking...

Through a convoluted global network that allows for a veneer of deniability (while also ensuring much of the West is grossly complicit), these F-35 parts sometimes go to other countries for assembly before arriving in Israel and mass slaughtering trapped Palestinians.

...

In Wong’s shirking of any responsibility, we hear her speaking aloud the type of internal logic that people complicit in atrocity use to detach so they can sleep at night. I was just following orders. There was nothing I could do. I only sold the peaceful parts of the big death plane. To normalise and be comfortable speaking such unrestrained garbage publicly, Wong must be surrounded by psychopaths and sycophants. To mistake this position for reasonableness is an indictment on everyone in Wong’s orbit.

Dave Milner at The Shot.

As Francesca Albanese pointed out, the widespread supply chain is the point: it creates a powerful incentive for participating nations to deny atrocities and genocide are being committed by the recipients of the planes, lest the numerous supplying countries be found complicit in those crimes. Our Foreign Minister's idiot claim that the parts we supply are non-lethal reveals a desperation that stems from the realisation that the crimes can no longer be denied, so we must resort to only denying our complicity.

Tom Lehrer 1928 - 2025

We've been waiting for this shoe to drop for a while, but it still hits hard.

Just last week I was thinking about Mr Lehrer's friend Hen3ry:

The 3 was silent, you see. Henry was financially independent having inherited his father's tar-and-feather business and was therefore able to devote his full time to such intellectual pursuits as writing. I particularly remember a heart-warming novel of his about a young necrophiliac who finally achieved his boy-hood ambition by becoming coroner. (The rest of you can look it up when you get home.) In addition to writing, he indulged in a good deal of philosophizing. Like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. One particular bit of advice which I recall, which is the reason I bring up this whole, dreary story, is something he said once before they took him away to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered. He said: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

As I have not recently had the opportunity to visit the comedy albums I listened to obsessively in my youth, and human memory being what it is, I erroneously recalled that Hen3ry's story formed the introduction to Mr Lehrer's song about Mexico, rather than for the finale of that show, the revivalist anthem celebrating the silver lining of a nuclear war: it would leave no-one behind to mourn. (I once saw "We Will All Go Together When We Go" performed at a mid-80s peace/disarmament rally by a prominent Australian folk singer, which would have amused/appalled Mr Lehrer no end.) This memory lapse meant I erased the introduction to "In Old Mexico", the biography of Samuel Gall, inventor of the gall bladder, who had started university majoring "in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day", before switching to medicine and inventing gargling, then going on to specialize in "diseases of the rich".

I've linked to it before, I'm sure, but here is Mr Lehrer's concert in Copenhagen.

Wertheim v. Haddad

"The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other."

Obvious

Spell it out. It’s absurd. There’s this freaky little Nazified genocidal colony swallowing Palestine, 82% of Israeli residents are in favour of ethnically cleansing Gaza, 47% of them want to murder every man, woman and child still cursed with being alive inside the concentration camp, and if you speak out about it anywhere, even in fucking Australia, you might lose your job...

It all makes it rather obvious you live inside a subservient (and embarrassingly eager) military vassal state to a rotting fascist empire eternally fueled by white supremacy and the blood of the Global South, doesn’t it?

Tentacles

That's weird. I thought octopuses were an anti-Semitic trope.

Joe Don Baker 1936-2025

One of the greats. RIP.

Wave

Obviously I approve of the result, but was there any reason to crush seals?

Typical

This triangle is going to help us explain how Australian politics has fundamentally changed.

Like typical triangles, it has three sides, and three corners.

,,, whoa, whoa, slow down, poindexter.

Great Television

Apropos the previous post, if you're a fan of those performances where a musical artist appears live on television to mime to a recording of their signature hit, you will be hard-pressed to find a finer specimen than this utterly demented example of the genre.

Now I Can't Unsee It

I don't know who, if anyone, needs to know this, but if you play the Parallax Corporation recruitment montage at 1.5 times its original speed, it's the same length as Mason Williams' "Classical Gas".

Close

In this case, Evatt’s gaffe mattered...

Following a closely fought election in 1954, it provided an opening for Robert Menzies to call an early election in 1955, which he won in a landslide. It paved the way for another 17 years of Coalition rule.

"Closely fought election" is an amusingly undetailed way to describe an election where the Evatt led Labor Party won not only the plurality and two-party preferred vote, but in fact won more than 50% of the first preference votes, clearly demonstrating who the majority of Australians wanted in power. The Senate election the previous year had produced the same result. In 1954 our idiotic region-based electoral system handed the Tories an illegitimate five seat majority and gave Menzies' infant Liberal party their second term in government, because democracy. Just to be clear.