Illiberal Neo-liberalism

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Plato’s Republic. Originally printed on mosaic. Each page weighed 14 tons. A weighty tome.

Sebastian Brandts tome.

Within the age of “corona-geddon” comes the realisation for those of us who are not necessarily winners, but aren’t entirely losers, that the world has been corrupted by neo liberalism.  And though politics has been taken over by the requirement for entertainment, and Boris and Donald stand as exemplars of their craft, we drift closer to the shoals, and the lighthouse keeper has done a bunk. Apparently, (this is astounding news) Plato, (Boris is the full bottle on ancient Latin) alluded to all of this in his book V1 of “The  Republic“. And then Sebastian Brant wrote his very own treatise, ” Ship of Fools”  which really got the Reformation going. Then some yank as recently as 2018 (Tucker Carlson) wrote his very own version of “Ship of Fools”, which took a red- hot go at the very luminaries we mentioned in rapture previously.

For SCOMO, the way out of this current crisis is to offer the tradies more cash via the home renovation initiative, (possibly up there with Franking Credits as the single most intelligent initiative of our time), and we look forward to his tome, “Ship of Tools”. There is a rumour about that the impressive leader of the Nationals, Michael McCormick is about to launch his Nation building treatise on waste water management, “Shit from Stools”, but it has been hijacked by Barnaby’s latest tome on meditation, “On  Stools I Shit”.

 

 

Barnaby, his very own fool, up ship creek sans paddle

But all of these are “Big READS”! Dull as dog-shit. And not one of the aforementioned will ever read them or take heed, cos they can’t be condensed into Dot-point or power-point. This is the problem with what’s left of western democracy.  For the leadership, (read Management-class and porn merchants) If it aint in Dot-point and cant be sent through to Lord Rupert of Murdoch and converted to FEAR, it’s effing USELESS!

That’s why we stand in unison to celebrate our very own scribe, St Ira of the near north for condensing it all and making some sense, which normal people, (read non-management class) can readily digest. Being digestible is what all good comprehension is about. That’s why we subscribe to the Ill-Read Digest.

 

Anyway, this is confabulation, so take it from from Ira, He writes……..

 

Dear Sir or Madam,

Very many congratulations on conquering the technique necessary to transferring ‘ murder in progress’ pictures onto emails.

It is almost impossible for me to imagine the subconscious, almost permanent fear and anxiety a black person in white society must feel.

The View from Michael McCormacks boat

Hitler, in pursuit of his own ‘master race’ agenda, took absolute advantage of the Great Depression to convince the hordes of unemployed that the Jews were somehow responsible for it all…so killing Jews became acceptable.
Nowadays this same appeal, this same pandering to the lowest has become appallingly acceptable.. Louts like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt, people whose views just a few years ago would have been utterly unacceptable, have now become ‘the voice of the people’. Murdoch has been allowed to buy up some of the most influential newspapers and magazines in the English speaking world in order to sell  his ‘voice of the people’ message.

But there’s a catch here…Murdoch, Bolt and Jones do not, and have never, represented the downtrodden, the dispossessed, or the marginalised.They are and always were the equivalent of Hitler’s propaganda machine. They represent the ruthless face of neo-liberalism., or neo-capitalism, a system of exploitation encouraged by the Chicago School of Economics and hurried along by Reagan and Thatcher. ‘Greed is Good’ has held sway for fifty years and has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, a wholly unprepared neo liberalism which has killed thousands of people over the last three months.

Ira fishing, before Barnaby and Michael rooted the Murray Darling.

I could go on but I’ll finish by saying that neo-liberalism has given us government by multi-nationals. Multi-nationals don’t give a tinker’s curse about you and me. And it is about time we told them to fuck off.
Thatcher once infamously said  that society is dead, doesn’t exist, forgeddaboudid. Oh really…?
Post war, I felt that the society I grew up in, cared about me. Pensions, unemployment benefits, free healthcare, free education.