Oddjob stereotyping the disabled? Regarding Oddjob as a woke opportunity has got to be peak woke insanity. Bagging the Japanese? Really. Cartoon sexiness? I don’t know what that even means.

Feeling offence has been a first world problem since, well, the first world. How the entire Western world came to the conclusion that anyone feeling offence, or claiming to, or acting on behalf of someone claiming to, has a right to call a halt to human proceedings is one of life’s mysteries. It is beyond mysterious.  It is certifiable.  It makes anything that bats might do look decidedly non-crazy.  Not remotely bonkers.  And bats didn’t have the benefit of the Enlightenment.  They are holding their own against us. 

IRRATIONAL

The supreme irony is that it is our age endlessly described as the educated age, the rational age, the progressive age, the modern age.

The BFI’s implicit crack at the unenlightened sixties, when the poor goons who lived then didn’t “get it”, looks a wee bit stupid.

The infantile idiocy of the BFI and its peers across most walks of life simply leaves one speechless. These people are merely playing at human seriousness. Batshit bonkers.

The woke revolution and its enforcement, hundreds of years after the Enlightenment supposedly delivered us rationality and the rejection of medievalism, demonstrates beyond doubt the utter poverty of the theory of human progress in any area other than plumbing.

Katie Hopkins doesn’t just confine herself to the United Kingdom. Why would she?

There is plenty of madness everywhere. All she has to do (for example) is to look across the Pond at the USA, as it enters an election year whose likely contest will involve a demented person and an incarcerated one.

Each, if it pans out that way, will be (literally) unable to fulfil the high office of president. The one totally sane candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, will be stopped, somehow, at all costs, by the system, from competing effectively. He tells the truth.

When you have an allegedly rational scholar and conservative hero, Niall Ferguson, claiming – while talking about the USA’s $76 billion spend on the Ukraine War – that when the word “billion” is mentioned, it sounds like a lot of money, you realise what we are all up against. Upside down.  Inside out. As the Travelling Wilburys had it:

Look out your window
That grass ain’t green
It’s kinda yellow
See what I mean

Look up your chimney
The sky ain’t blue
It’s kinda yellow
You know it’s true

And it’s so hard to figure what it’s all about

When your outside’s in (inside out)
And your downside’s up (upside down)
Yeah, your upside’s right (right side up)
Yeah, don’t it make you wanna twist and shout
When you’re inside out?

Curt Smith and Roalnd Orzabal had their own lyrical take, in a song made more famous by Gary Jules:

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world
Mad world.

It is almost as if we are all living in some new, totally weird version of The Truman Show film. Where everyone is acting a part. Who is directing it?

American libertarian Jeffrey Tucker puts it like this: “The battle of the future really is between them and us but who or what ‘them’ is remains opaque and too many of ‘us’ are still confused about what the alternative is to what is happening all around us.”

For my money, pondering the “them”, the usual suspects (the Big Three) will be familiar to readers – globalist corporates and related elites, the Chinese Communist Party and the Islamists are the most prominent candidates.

Each group, in thrall to an ideology, wishes to refashion and control the world and all its people in its own way, in its own image and for its own purposes.

Each of these essentially imperialist efforts is swimming in a festy Western swamp of post-modernism in which the totally mad can be made out as “rational”, as sane, as justifiable.

So much of what passes for governance is nowadays merely performative, skin-deep gibberish dressed up as serious, purposeful activity done in our interests.

Tucker has his own take on persistent madness, and his own examples: “The train wasn’t scheduled for another 20 minutes, so I had a chance to contemplate the official sign on the door of the huge elevator leading to the platform. It said that only four people are allowed in because we must all practice social distancing. There was a helpful map of the interior of the elevator with stick figures telling people exactly where to stand.

“Yes, these stickers are still everywhere. I recall when they first went up, sometime in April, 2020. They seemed oddly uniform and appeared even permanent. At the time I thought, oh, this is a huge error because within a few weeks, the error of the whole of this idiocy is going to be known by all. Sadly, my worst fears came true: it was designed to be a permanent feature of our lives.”

And so, in Tucker’s thinking, it was deliberate and meant to be permanent. Madness inflicted on a population prepped for acquiescing in madness.

This particular madness?: “The essential message of all these edicts: you are pathogenic, a carrier, poisonous, dangerous and so is everyone else. Every human person is a disease vector. While it’s fine you are out and about, you must always create a little isolation zone around you such that you have no contact with other human beings.”

IMPOSED

This is something so irrational that it could only be imposed, then embedded, in an already mad world. An objectively disordered world.

“It’s so odd that no dystopian book or novel ever imagined a plot centered on such a stupid and evil concept. Not even in 1984 or The Hunger Games, or The Matrix or Equilibrium, or Brave New World or Anthem, was it ever imagined that a government would institute a rule that all people in public spaces must stand six feet away in all directions from any other person.

“That some government would insist on this was too crazy for even the darkest imaginings of the most pessimistic prognosticator. That 200 governments in the world, at roughly the same time, would go there was unimaginable.”

Unimaginable. But it happened. We all agreed to it. Batshit bonkers, n’est pas?

US foreign policy expert NS Lyons is on a similar theme to Katie Hopkins and the others, in a masterful essay titled The China Convergence: “The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed.

“Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain.

“Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the State as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie.

“Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher… “ [emphasis added]

Tragi-comedy of the absurd. Indeed it is. Another phrase now used to describe our current way of approaching things is “magical thinking”. Of which, more below.

Our current global madness is marked by governments, often popularly elected, who think it’s their job to attempt to change the climate and to “eliminate” viruses they themselves have created, all the while killing innocent people with abortion, euthanasia, bioweapons and gene therapy.

Madness marked by corporations and other institutions who belittle us, seek to change us, lie to us and endlessly annoy the crap out of us.

SILENCE US

And, more significantly, who silence us, even if their raison d’etre is “social” media. Hence Facebook employs over 15,000 “content moderators”. Yes, 15,000.

And yet billions of us sign up to Facebook. We are all complicit. Set up a platform for talking to one another, then stop us from talking to each other?

And yes, they do think we are stupid, as US bioethics advisor Aaron Kheriaty says. They must think this.

Kheriaty has been publishing random headlines from around the place (mainly America) without any accompanying text or comment, certain in the knowledge that the headlines themselves attest to the level of madness into which we have all entered.

One got my attention, “It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses”. Then there was this, “Coming out as transgender made me a more effective CIA officer”. Or, “Did COVID precautions work? Yes, but they didn’t make a big difference”. Then, “Wikipedia may delete entry on ‘mass killings’ under communism due to claims of bias”. Finally, “Scientists attempting to design self-spreading vaccines that can jump from vaccinated to unvaccinated populations”.

But it isn’t only governments in play here.

The late Andrew Breitbart once said – and this is much quoted – that culture is upstream from politics. This explains much about our current madness.

The mad politics are only allowed to play out because the culture is already mad. Define mad? Post-modern, absent the notion of absolute truth(s), unserious, unhinged from reality, ephemeral, unfocused, missing what matters, chasing dreams, giving up on common sense as a guiding principle, engaging routinely, indeed reflexively, in “magical thinking”.

The last has been explained recently by Australian economist Henry Ergas: “If today’s zeitgeist has a defining feature, it is magical thinking, in which premonitions of disaster are combined with utopian fantasies.

Ergas also provided examples: “What surer evidence of collective madness could there be than the thousands of inner-city Lefties, having denounced Australia’s founding fathers as murderers, who now ‘pay their respects’ to past Indigenous elders who rained violence on women and kids?”

He might actually have said “batshit bonkers”. How the hell did this happen?

OBSESSING

The clever neo-Marxist revolutionaries had a plan, as it happens. They have quietly changed the culture, one institution at a time, while encouraging everyone to keep looking at, and obsessing over, the downstream politics, as if this all mattered. It largely doesn’t.

It is theatre, now played out via social media and twenty-four hour cable TV. But we act as if it does matter.

The legacy media repeatedly report the madness. The media amplify everything going on. (And they hide stuff too, by strategic non-reportage.)

They now add a new level of reportage. They quote people no one has ever heard of spouting their ill-considered views on X/Twitter.

So, more nonsense gets piled onto the original nonsense. Layers of madness are added until the non-story seems to become real – and sane. It saves anyone thinking about reality. As we shall see below, right here, right now.

Other institutions embrace the madness, thereby mainstreaming it. Normalising it. Making it seem both real and unexceptional at the same time.

The so-called intelligentsia give it all respectability and help drive changes in thinking across society as a whole. And so, the relentless propaganda rolls out and on. New values become embedded, seamlessly.

Hence we get:

• Men marrying men;
• Men becoming women;
• Half the population happily (or not) doing what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”;
• Lining up in queues for COVID PCR tests that prove nothing, when we are not even ill;
• Taking the eighth jab;
• Driving all our cars off the cliff to stop the earth warming by two degrees over a century;
• Printing money we do not have to solve problems that do not exist;
• Considering terrorists as freedom fighters; and
• Everyone thinking all this is sane, normal, intelligent, “moral”.

Yes, we believe things that we know not to be true, or good, or sane. A little like the Asch conformity experiments. And worse, we accept them. Look the other way.

This a societal disease. It is what post-modernism will do to you. Just read Roger Scruton’s Thinkers of the New Left to see what supposedly smart people (who were/are paid to be smart, God help us) will say and believe, and just how far we have fallen.

And, on top of this, we have also quietly moved from democracy to autocracy, whatever the label one attaches to the polity. All systems have tiptoed, even slouched, towards totalitarianism. Often the result is soft totalitarianism, but it is totalitarianism nonetheless.

Hence NS Lyons’ point that the USA and China are converging. Both countries are run by unelected technocrat-oligarchs. Both society and governance have been transformed. This was engineered.

WHATEVER

As Lyons notes: “Many of us recognise by now that whatever it is we now live under, it sure isn’t ‘liberal democracy’.”

Hence the place changes without anyone’s permission, even without anyone’s awareness. No one has voted for this. Now that is clever.

Change the government and change the country, Paul Keating said. He is only partly right, and less right now than thirty years ago.

Only revolutionary Parties like Labor change the country. The Liberals do not – ever – change it back.

It is cultural and broad institutional change that really transform countries. The only regimes of which I am aware that is trying to change a country or State back to its former self through cultural measures are Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Ron DeSantis’s Florida.

But in some cases, policy combines with cultural changes, in a lockstep process and a virtuous revolutionary circle.

The combination of mass immigration and multiculturalism as policy is an example. Another is the lockstep process of the masses accepting surveillance in exchange for “convenience” in their tech devices.

Then the State steps in with legislation that kills dissidence and free speech, without anyone noticing. The heavy lifting has already been done. The three-card trick that led to COVID compliance is the biggest case of them all.

Scaring people, whether with scams or with viruses, is a powerful tool for control and for cultural change. Appeal to fear when the appeal to convenience fails.

The old debate over whether the world is evil or simply mad, too, is alive and well in 2024. I guess that when most of the world doesn’t even believe there is evil, it shows we are actually mad. Or perhaps evil. Daniel Andrews proves you can be both.

Which brings us to batshit bonkers down under.

Australia’s own localised version of batshit bonkers behaviour is peaking in high summer, in a mix and maze of sporting and political weirdness. It used to be called “bread and circuses”.

Just look around the Australian summer. Madness and magical thinking abound. There is cricket, and politics, and sometimes the two almost seem to merge.

I just received an email from “the Australian Cricket family”, which read: “The KFC BBL will again honour our First Nations people with dedicated matches across the country showcasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and ceremonies.

IMMERSIVE

“Each Big Bash club will be sporting brand-new and unique kits designed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Additionally to this, each game will feature immersive experiences for fans and the incorporation of local languages.”

I thought the huge No vote in the recent referendum shouted a message at the elites. But their tone deafness is matched by a ruthless determination to force feed us with Indigenous and related woke ideology.

The campaign and the messaging are relentless. Cricket test matches are now commenced with welcome to country ceremonies of increasing length and decreasing interest and relevance to anyone’s lives. It is embarrassing.

Our Prime Minister – surely the one we see on-screen is “acting” and there is a real one off-stage somewhere – sees fit to regale us in his first presser of 2024 with a plea to “the thief” to return a couple of (apparently) lost cricket caps to the (mercifully) retiring batsman, David Warner, caps lost while (not surprisingly) under the “care” of Qantas.

“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called for the return of the baggy green caps which were stolen from Australian cricketer David Warner,” announced Sky News.

“Mr Albanese called for their immediate return during a press conference on Wednesday.

“ ‘I will be attending, briefly, the beginning of Davey Warner’s last Test match at the SCG,’ ” Mr Albanese said.

“ ‘I do hope if it hasn’t happened already, whoever knows anything about the missing caps – Dave Warner has represented Australia on more than 100 occasions – the baggy green caps belong to him.

“ ‘He has earnt them and they should be returned.’ ”

Airbus Albo’s avoidance of issues of greater importance than David Warner’s missing caps didn’t impress everyone:-

“Albo now doing an advertorial for Dave Warner’s baggy greens. I agree return them but the PM? Such a trivial man.”

“Just after hosting the cricketers I see Albo has now spent his morning texting with Channel 7 how imperative it is to find David Warner’s missing baggy green. Would have thought working on Australia’s economy was more important but I guess there is no selfie in that.”

“Will this Albanese presser in a few minutes be a plea to return the baggy green of Warner? Would he do something as crass?” [Yes, he would].

“Albo is addressing the big issues. He is trying to find Dave Warner’s baggy green.”

And, as we know, the missing caps eventually did (somehow) turn up.

No explanation from anyone as to how they re-emerged.

What the hell was that all about? Those given to seeing conspiracies all around – and, alas, they are all around – might have an opinion.

When all that is apparently “real” is decidedly not, when all that is seemingly sane isn’t, and when appearances are now routinely deceptive, one might even think the whole cap saga was a stunt. To what end, one might wonder.

As the Twelfth Man once said, in Richie Benaud’s character, “cricket’s a funny game and, these days, anything can happen”. He said that in 1984.

A surreal Aussie summer. Bonkers.

While politicians do cricket, cricketers continue to do politics. The ubiquitous Usman Khawaja is reportedly seeking counselling to deal with his “lack of motivation” resulting from his involvement in “human rights issues”.

That is, his terrorist-adjacent calls for cease fires in a war in the Middle East that would only benefit one side. There is just no end to this guy.

SOLIDARITY

“Australian opener Usman Khawaja has openly discussed the impact of his support for Palestine during the Sheffield Shield cricket season, revealing a notable lack of motivation leading up to the Test summer. Khawaja expressed his solidarity for Palestine amidst the Gaza conflict, a stance that resulted in reprimands from the International Cricket Council (ICC) during his representation for Australia against Pakistan.”

Albo, of course, stands with Khawaja. Commends his “courage”. Again, Albo is simply all over the issues that matter to Australians, as we sink into the mire.

Unsurprisingly, the Test Captain, Pat “climate emergency” Cummins, supports his Muslim brother.

“As I said last week, ‘all lives are equal’, I don’t think that’s very offensive and I’d say the same about the dove [on Khawaja’s shoes],” Cummins had said.

I fail to see much “courage” in Khawaja’s ongoing support for Palestine. It might be argued that courage would be going down to the Sydney Opera House after 7/10 and reminding the Palestinians screaming “gas the Jews” that all lives matter.

That all lives are equal, including those of the innocent victims of terrorism.

Khawaja is supporting a regime that wants to eliminate a race of people. We normally call this ethnic cleansing. All those lives matter too.

And so, a narrative gets embedded. Doves on your cricket shoes become historical and geo-political analysis. That becomes the conversation. Skin-deep thinking as reality. Accepted with demur.  Without thought nor reflection.

Albo, too, is terrorist-adjacent. And baggy green adjacent. Not Voice-adjacent, though, these days.

After the miserable failure of his referendum in October, he has found new causes and simply left our Indigenous brothers behind.

Meantime, his underling ministers are organising the destruction of our countryside (with wind farms), impoverishing farmers, destroying fauna, lining us all up for digital IDs, banning dissidents from social media, handing over our health system to international bodies run out of China, trashing our already pathetically meagre defence forces, allowing an invasion of the place by immigrants, many of whom hate us before they get here. [see video below]

Sportsmen involved in complex, nasty wars. Politicians “addressing” cricket teams before matches. Getting involved in finding missing caps. Ringing television stations. Endless Warners and their soap operas. Uncles welcoming us to “country” at the grounds.

Not to mention first nations rounds of hit-and-giggle cricket, complete with immersive cultural experiences designed to re-education whitey.

Batshit bonkers Australia, where all of life is now a re-education program driven by ruling elite-driven subliminal messaging and propaganda, and a new, Left-liberal jingoism. We are right up there with Katie Hopkins’ Britain.

PART-TIME THINKERS

Yes, the Aussies are doing their bit. Outsourcing serious issues to the unserious. To the ideologues. To the part-time thinkers. To the totally unsupervised narrative-writers. To the Kool-Aid drinkers. To those offended by Oddjob. They run the show now. People who get offended by Oddjob now tell us how to live our lives.

The bigger point is that bonkers is merely code for the irrational madness described and explained above and for the larger processes at work in what we formerly regarded as liberal democracies.  Where voters had a say in their governance.  The obsession with pretend issues and theatrics that now infests the culture, the media, the governments and the great unwashed is but one of the out-workings of a slow, long-term, seemingly permanent, secular decline. 

Back in 1973, Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd said, on their iconic album, The Dark Side of the Moon, “I know I’m mad”.

They were referring to the madness of the individual. And they knew they were mad. Now, the madness is society-wide, and we do not know we are mad. As Charles McKay realised, back in the 1840s.

Madness isn’t the whole story, of course. But – the bats out there must be chuckling.PC

– Paul Collits