The pond woke with a sense of Friday dread, and decided it needed to open with a distraction, a little light relief..
The pond doesn't get out enough, but amid the splendid sight of Uncle Elon driving X into the ground, it's important not to forget other bizarre events, as reported by John Carreyrou in the NY Times a few days ago, under the header The Strange $55 Million Saga of a Netflix Series You'll Never See, with the lede After suitors flocked to a sci-fi project by Carl Rinsch, director of a single movie, the winner handed over money and control. They’re still fighting. (paywall)
The pond won't do spoilers, it's a long read, but here's a teaser trailer.
Soon after he signed the contract, Mr. Rinsch’s behavior grew erratic, according to members of the show’s cast and crew, texts and emails reviewed by The New York Times, and court filings in a divorce case brought by his wife. He claimed to have discovered Covid-19’s secret transmission mechanism and to be able to predict lightning strikes. He gambled a large chunk of the money from Netflix on the stock market and cryptocurrencies. He spent millions of dollars on a fleet of Rolls-Royces, furniture and designer clothing.
Mr. Rinsch and Netflix are now locked in a confidential arbitration proceeding initiated by Mr. Rinsch, who claims the company breached their contract and owes him at least $14 million in damages. Netflix has denied owing Mr. Rinsch anything and has called his demands a shakedown.
A little later ...
In Budapest, Mr. Rinsch went days without sleep and accused his wife of plotting to have him assassinated, two people who witnessed the outburst said.
Ms. Rosés later said in a court filing in her divorce case that Mr. Rinsch’s behavior had started to change even before the overseas shoots. On several occasions, he had thrown things at her and twice punched holes in a wall.
Mr. Rinsch has said he was diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and took medications for both. Ms. Rosés and some crew members worried about his use of Vyvanse, an amphetamine that is commonly prescribed to treat A.D.H.D. When overused, the drug can have serious side effects, including mania, delirium and even psychosis, according to psychiatrists.
A little later ...
In the following months, he behaved more erratically. Like many people, he was deeply affected by the pandemic, and he espoused strange theories about the coronavirus, according to text messages and emails reviewed by The Times. When Ms. Rosés went to check on him in June 2020, he took her to a scenic lookout in the Hollywood hills and pointed at planes overhead. They were “organic, intelligent forces” that “came to say hi,” he told her, according to Ms. Rosés’s filing in the divorce case. He also sent her texts claiming that he could predict lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions...
And so on ...
Through bitter personal experience, the pond knows that the film and television industry is a den of madness ... you only have to watch the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now to get a rich dose.
It's probably wrong to dwell on the misfortune attending the making of the film and the unfortunates involved, though the pond is cheerful enough about Netflix stepping into that cow pat ...
What the story does remind the pond of is the form of incipient insanity the pond feels creeping over it each time it takes a dive into the pages of the lizard Oz ...the horror, the horror, if you will ...
Stop it, that's more than enough. What's happening below the fold?
As feared the pond regulars were busy working for Benji's government, so the pond turned to Ted for a little comedy. Would tiresome, tedious Ted ever mention the Liberal government wot set Snowy in motion, or Malware, who spruiked it?
All to avoid renewables and best of all, no mention of Malware's vision ...much blather about the results of the vision, but the man himself and his dreaming had been disappeared, had vanished, from the story ...
And so to a novel strategy to deal with the pond's Friday regulars ...
With this the latest news in WaPo from the collective punishment and ethnic cleansing and purging and displacement mob ...
Israel urged people in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, where it said they would be safer, but the IDF has since struck parts of the south.
At previous large gatherings near Gaza’s border with Israel, the IDF said it has issued verbal warnings “using megaphones and sound projection systems,” but that as those were “generally ineffective,” it has employed “non-lethal means, primarily the use of tear gas … to avoid higher risk situations which necessitate other uses of force.”
... the pond decided it couldn't cope with a typical presentation of our Henry and cackling Claire...
Instead the pond would strip them of the status granted by the gobbet methodology... call it a form of collective punishment if you will. As a bonus, this would make it easy for anyone to copy and paste a comment if they could raise the energy.
First it was necessary to get out of the way the huge snaps used to elevate the hole in the bucket man's piece ...
... and then defanged and downgraded, the pond could begin UN’s charge of ‘genocide’ robs term of all meaning...
There will, it goes without saying, be no mention of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of the West Bank, and so on ...
Even when set against the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the rapporteurs’ statement, which steers well clear of declaring Hamas’s goals and conduct genocidal, is laughable. In effect, as William Schabas notes in his authoritative treatise on Genocide in International Law (2000), making out a charge of genocide “requires the prosecution to establish the highest level of specific intent”.
But it is obvious Israel’s “specific intent” is not to exterminate the inhabitants of Gaza – had that been its goal, it could have achieved it with devastating speed by aerial bombardment, without endangering thousands of Israeli servicemen and women.
And the fact the claim is manifestly inconsistent with Israel’s unceasing efforts to warn civilians of impending military action, and encourage them to move to safety, only further undermines its credibility.
The result was a legal instrument the American Bar Association called full of “vague formulations that could be used against the United States”, but which plainly “lacked the teeth” to prevent the genocides carried out by authoritarian regimes.
Opened for signing as the Cold War turned especially threatening, North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950 provided the Soviet Union with the first opportunity to test the new Convention’s propaganda value.
Almost immediately, China and the USSR charged that the US, instead of simply ensuring South Korea’s self-defence, was perpetrating a genocide that “overshadowed even the Nazi atrocities” by dropping bombs “stuffed with insects infected with communicable diseases” on North Korean schools, hospitals and refugee camps.
Those contentions were entirely concocted, as historians Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg have shown. Far from suffering genocidal attacks, the North Korean regime, acting on Chinese and Soviet advice, had injected prisoners with cholera bacteria and then provided tissue samples from their corpses to supposedly reputable human rights investigators.
But despite their complete falsity, the claims were a propaganda triumph, fuelling massive anti-American protests worldwide. That success, which confirmed the shock value of accusations of genocide, cemented a pattern that was to be repeated time and again.
Central to that pattern was the use of prominent dupes. Behind his back, the Soviets ridiculed Bertrand Russell, who had distinguished himself in the run-up to World War II by suggesting that in the event of a German invasion, Nazi troops should be welcomed in Britain as “tourists”, since the manifold charms of the British way of life would take “the starch out of them”. But Russell and a bevy of illustrious lawyers, whose intelligence was surpassed only by their stupidity, unfailingly lent an aura of authority to even the most far-fetched allegations.
As that process played itself out, the claim that a “genocide” was under way, in any one of its “ecological”, “cultural”, “racial” or just plain “ethnic” varieties, was applied by a bewildering range of UN bodies and experts to over 80 countries, accounting for four-fifths of the world’s population.
No country, however, was targeted more relentlessly than Israel. Yet again, the Soviet Union under Stalin took the lead, first accusing Israel of perpetrating a genocide “no different from the Nazis” in 1950, just as the Arab League was threatening to renew its war of extermination against the Jewish state.
After that, the clamour never subsided: from 1948 to 1988, fully one-fifth of the articles in Pravda mentioning genocide involved accusations hurled at Israel.
Indeed, the last comprehensive Soviet study of genocide, published during the Gorbachev era, downplayed the USSR’s own crimes while accusing Israel of cold-bloodedly murdering Palestinian children by distributing bombs disguised as toys. And even those contentions, presented without a skerrick of evidence, paled compared to the claims of the Arab states and their fellow-travellers – claims in which the assimilation of Zionism to Nazism, and of Israeli leaders to Hitler, was always uppermost.
The aim of this propaganda blitz was clear: if Israel was itself perpetrating a genocide comparable to the Nazis’, it could hardly derive any moral legitimacy from the Holocaust. Rather, as an abomination, it deserved, like the Hitler regime, to be wiped out, justifying its enemies’ genocidal plans.
But the ultimate result of the strategy the Soviets pioneered, with its endless proliferation of genocide claims, was to rid the notion of its substance.
Winston Churchill, when he reported in 1941 on the atrocities the Nazis were committing in the western borderlands of the USSR, had called them “a crime without a name”. Now, the term, coined in response to his speech, remained, but it was a name without a crime. As Weiss-Wendt put it, “genocide” had become “a hollowed-out vessel that could be filled with any meaning” – once everything is genocide, nothing is.
The effect, highlighted by last week’s UN statement, is not only to distort public understanding of the contexts to which the term is recklessly applied; it is, even worse, to occlude the distinctiveness of radical evil.
We cannot, nowadays, even come close to fathoming what was experienced by those the Holocaust sought to destroy. The all-consuming fear the prisoners in the camps had to swallow in order to continue to live; the constant prospect that one might at any moment be beaten, hanged, or shot; the aching hunger without any prospect of respite; the deliberate, calculated reduction of human beings to walking, crawling skeletons, suspended in the no-man’s land between life and death; and then death itself, industrialised, everywhere present, stripped of all dignity, shorn of all meaning.
Genuinely comprehending those experiences is impossible. And as they recede into the past, they risk becoming ever more abstract, ever more removed from our mental map. That is why institutions such as Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum, which allow us to stare genocide in the face, are of such importance. But it is also why the UN statement is so utterly pernicious.
By blurring the distinction between the radical evil that was shockingly on display on October 7 and the response to it, the statement legitimates an entirely false moral equivalence behind which that evil can shelter, strengthen and strike. There neither is, nor could there possibly be, any surer way of guaranteeing yet more genocides. And, in the Islamists’ tender hands, they will be the real thing.
Just to make the collective punishment even clearer ...
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba.
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.
And now to a serve of cackling Claire, also stripped of gobbet status ...Mid-East war drives global schism on the left
In Washington DC, near the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, escalating tensions led to violent clashes that injured six police officers, resulting in evacuation of the area.
In Britain, hundreds of protesters marched through Labour leader Keir Starmer’s constituency after he refused to vote for a “ceasefire”. And in Sydney on Tuesday night, 23 people were arrested after holding an illegal demonstration against an Israeli container ship at Port Botany.
Responding to the Port Botany protest on Tuesday night, NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns made the commonsense observation: “We cannot have a situation where our ports are blocked for commerce because one group or another has a political disagreement with another country.”
Federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil likewise did not hold back when she described the protest as “anti-Semitic” and “utterly despicable”.
It is both reasonable and commendable that Minns and O’Neil expressed these views. The Australian Labor Party, a party of government at state and federal levels, cannot afford to partake in the performative activism of the Greens and the hard left, even if it might appeal to some of its constituents. More broadly, however, the notion that protests in Australia could in any way influence the conflict in Gaza is highly unrealistic, if not downright insane.
Israel is a democracy, which means its government answers to the Israeli people. And the Israeli citizenry demand Hamas be destroyed in response to the massacre of October 7. Protests around the world will not change that. On the contrary, global pro-Palestinian protests and rising anti-Semitism are only reinforcing the Israeli public’s demand for their government’s protection.
But apart from failing to understand the political realities of the war, the hard left’s concept of political action does not seem to go much further beyond dress-ups. Safe inside liberal democratic nations, with their Pride weeks and music festivals, Westerners can wear rainbow keffiyehs while calling for the destruction of the only democracy in the Middle East – knowing full well they will never have to live under the yoke of theocratic fascists such as Hamas.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Paul Berman, in his book, Power and the Idealists, notes that the 1968 generation of New Left activists were mainly driven by a mix of nostalgia and fear stemming from their childhood experiences during World War II.
Many of them lived with the fear that the Nazis had not been completely vanquished, and would one day return. Imagining themselves as following in the footsteps of the heroic French Resistance, New Left radicals grasped at any insurgent cause they could find. This led them to absurd and dangerous places, such as the jungles of Latin America and eastern Cambodia alongside Che Guevara and the Khmer Rouge. It also led some of them to hijack planes alongside Palestinian terrorists.
These radicals yearned for a revolutionary purpose, and they did almost anything to find it.
A classic example of the misguided radical was Wilfred Bose, a German leftist who participated in the 1976 Entebbe hijacking with the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation. Upon helping his comrades hijack Air France Flight 139, he was told by the PFLP to separate Jews and Israelis from the other passengers, who were then set free.
Bose was apparently taken aback by the command. He had become a left-wing radical because he wanted to fight Nazis. Yet here he was kidnapping Jews.
To be sure, defending the human rights of Palestinians or calling for peace are without a doubt noble causes. But real peace rallies would call for the return of Israeli hostages at the same time as calling for a ceasefire. Real peace rallies would carry Israeli and Palestinian flags, side by side. And real peace rallies would call on Hamas to surrender and evacuate from civilian areas.
None of this happens at our “ceasefire” rallies, of course, because they are not about peace at all. They demand “peace” from one side only.
It is perhaps for this reason, most Australians are averse to them. A study by Resolve Research shows a significant disparity in Australian public opinion: only 14 per cent support ceasefire protests, while nearly 70 per cent prefer Australia to remain uninvolved in the Israel-Gaza conflict.The Resolve study reflects the reality that many on the centre left still believe in universal values. Abhorring racism in all its forms, including anti-Semitism, they believe in the “fair go” that does not discriminate by skin colour, religion or nationality.
Unfortunately for the centre left, however, the hard left disagrees. According to hard-left moral logic, ships should be protested because of the nationality of their origin (Israeli), businesses should be boycotted because of their owners’ religion (Judaism).
Centre-left politicians such as Minns and O’Neil, who stand firm against the extreme views on their left, deserve recognition, even when we might disagree with them on other matters.
History shows anti-Semitism tends to rise in societies where moderate forces lose control and demagogues from either side exploit divisions to seize power.
In Australia, we must counter the divisive tactics of the hard left by raising our voices for universal values. We must raise them as loud as we can.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette.