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PROGRESS MEASURED
Geoffrey Wheatcroft recalls his friend Shiva Naipaul, twenty years after Naipaul’s death:
I still laugh when I remember Shiva’s descriptions of his quasi-disastrous visit to Australia shortly before his death for the purpose of writing another book, and his unhappy dealings with Australian progressive intellectuals, politically correct avant la phrase and altogether one of the most dogmatic groups of people on earth. When he suggested at one such gathering that the Aborigines had not, perhaps, achieved a civilisation to be compared with that of China or of Europe or of India, there was fathomless silence and polar chill.
From The Spectator; no link available. Australia in the mid-80s was a PC hellzone. Some elements of that remain—mostly safely caged at Fairfax newspapers and in the ABC—but Naipaul would these days find Australia a much less frosty place to visit.
Dogs determine the level of a civilization http://home.att.net/~rhhardin/heelbike.jpg
Well, ya gotta remember, in the mid-80’s, Margo was still in her forties and sober, and Philco Adams could rise from his chair unassisted. Progressives were a lot tougher back then.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 08 21 at 01:54 PM • permalinkWhen I was in Oz in 2003, I found your country much less afflicted than ours (U.S.). It seems to exist in spite of what the majority of voters are saying as well. For instance, in the 80s, when PC was raging in most areas of the culture, Ronald Reagan was elected twice.
PC seems to have a strange, schizophrenic aspect to it. Either that, or PC causes this schizophrenic break in our national psyche. For instance, we parade sex around tantalizingly in print adverts and on the telly where the camera zooms right in on breasts and asses constantly, but you mustn’t look at a woman’s tits while you’re talking to her. Huh? Then why are they just sitting there right in front of me? Answer me that.
“Then why are they just sitting there right in front of me?”
...because God is cruel.
Posted by Aaron - Freewill on 2005 08 21 at 02:25 PM • permalinkekw:
You might want to read the series on PC & Defects in Reality Testing over at Shrinkwrapped. In short, Political Correctness is nuts.Then why are they just sitting there right in front of me? Answer me that.
Because you’re genetically programmed to look at them. Every time you look a woman in the eye, you’re fighting a million years of evolution. Not worth the effort, I say.
I like the chicks who put glitter on them to draw attention. Talk about coals to Newcastle.
Then why are they just sitting there right in front of me? Answer me that.
And, if they don’t want us looking at them, why do so many women spend big bucks for a boob job?
Oh, yeah. It’s for their own “self-esteem”! In other words…“It makes me feel good when you stare at my large breasts”.
At least we men would be honest about it, if we could get our manhood enhanced.
“To get more chicks!!!”
Clue to guys: the only package men have that women are interested in you having “enhanced” is your wallet. It’s sad but it’s true. Why do you think so many young, beautiful women marry old, wealthy toads? Don’t bother enlarging your parts; we tend to just point and laugh at comically huge wieners.
Oh, and the reason you aren’t supposed to look at our tits is because you (wallet-challenged males) aren’t supposed to look at our tits. We’re saving our tits for Mr.
HugewalletRight, and until then just pretend our glitter-painted, upthrust pillowy gazongas just aren’t there. And pay for the drinks while you’re at it.Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 08 21 at 06:49 PM • permalinkAh, breasts.
Lovely to look at.
Delightful to hold.
Tough to have a conversation with.
And lord knows we’ve tried.Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 08 21 at 06:58 PM • permalinkWomen’s breasts move like no other object and always attract the eyes of both males and females when they do. Why? i think we are genetically programmed to notice them from birth for purely nutritional reasons but this eventually becomes sexual partly because of the deliberate packaging. Women check out each others tits as much as men do.
rog2: right, the security of a father with money.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 08 21 at 07:55 PM • permalinkSee, this is why Islamonuts are so crazy mean. If they do accidentally catch a glimpse of a woman (which they’re not supposed to do. At all.) all they see is a walking tent.
I have to agree with Andrea about the money. Eventually all that other stuff droops to dismaying levels, and if there’s no money, all you’re left with is a fond memory.
Getting back to the topic…There has always been an 18th century, Rousseau-esque approach amongst some PC elements in Australia to Aborgines as Noble Savages, romanticising their culture, idealising them as environmentally aware (because they didn’t chop down trees, erode the soil by ploughing crops or introduce sheep farming)and living in harmony with each and with the land. In fact, Aboriginal life was nasty, brutish and cruel, as bad as the 18th century cultures from which the first white settlers (PCspeak: “invaders”) came.
It is quite legitimate to compare similar cultures, and amongst Stone Age societes Aboringines rank low. However, it’s unfair to compare them to Chinese or Indian cultures.
They have a rich and diverse culture - as evidenced by the cultural happenings in the Northern Territory recently.
A 40 something male was not happy with the 14 year old girl who had been promised to him as a bride when she was four years old. So he hit her over the head with a boomerang and sodomised her. Because of the cultural nature of the case he was given one month in gaol.
Of course the PC brigade will scream that these things happen in white society all the time but I have yet to see a claim of a cultural right to behave that way.No aboriginal people that I know of ever had the wheel except some of the South American Indians who had tiny ones, like coins, which they could only figure out to use for childrens’ toys. It never occurred to them to make bigger ones and attach them to a travois and pull stuff around. It was that way right up until the Spanish hacked their way into their lives, poor bastards. They learned about the wheel then, I imagine.
(No wheels, but what about the orbit - the returning boomerang?)
It could be argued that, today, Australia is more politically correct than ever before in that PC has filtered down from its ivory tower lair and coloured every day-to-day aspect of people’s lives. After all, it couldn’t have gotten any worse in academia. Examples: the children’s daycare centre banning parents from being described as ‘mother’ and ‘father’; the banning of ham sandwiches at council events in Hume for fear of offending ... er, people who don’t like ham, I guess, or maybe Muslims; the banning of Christmas being even mentioned let alone celebrated in kindergartens and schools ... the list goes on.
Hmmmm I wonder what the PC crowd would make of the news thatSydney will host the Catholic World Youth Day.
That’s got to breach something like a dozen PC ‘rules’ doesn’t it?
—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2005 08 22 at 01:21 AM • permalinkRe, #24…Mr. Magoo, why do you consider a serious discussion of female breasts as “off topic”?
Not only is any discussion of women and their breasts is on topic, it is serious.
Having said that, the “Noble Savage” myth still bounces around North America. For example, many of the PC crowd there denounce Christopher Columbus for taking slaves, but ignore the fact that many North American tribes did that for a long before (and after!) the European discovered the continent. There’s an annual push to do away with Columbus Day, for example.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 08 22 at 01:34 AM • permalinkI have struck the PC thing with a very good friend of mine (considering he works for the ABC, and is therefore very left) and his librarian wife. When explaining why we liked to go overseas to look at the evidence of civilisation stretching back centuries, they were most indignant that we didn’t consider the aboriginals at least the equal of the Romans and Greeks - and maybe better because of their “living in harmony with the land”. This was such a tenet of theirs that they accused me of doing a Windshuttle (sp). I hadn’t, but maybe I should before I get into my next discussion.
living in harmony with the land
You gotta love that peculiar twist on the “noble savage” myth.
How exactly does burning large swathes of land and hunting megafauna to extinction fit in with that?
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 08 22 at 02:22 AM • permalink#34, Seza, did you ask them to cite Aboriginal equivalents of Homer, Ovid or Livy? Better still, to quote from Aboriginal literature in the orignal language? What about architecture: bark shanties equivalent to the Parthenon ?
(examples please).OK,OK, so no written language, well how about dance traditions equivalent to the classical dramas of Asia - the Ramayana of Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia for example?
Still stumped are we, well how about philosophers equivalent to Plato?
Gee, why am I getting all this hatred? I guess I know how Windshuttle feels.
Leftie definition of civilization:
“Whatever we deem to be civilized.”
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 08 22 at 03:59 AM • permalinkI thought most historian/anthropolgists drew the distinction between culture and civilization. The aborigines were undoubtedly a developed culture but could not be classed as a civilization which required more developed societal structures, in particular towns/cities and the attendant civil society that grew with them. It was therefore not an insult to say that indigenous societies didn’t represent civilizations but that didn’t necessarily devalue their culture.
I just find the attitudes as reported by SezaGeoff in #34 to be the extremes of PC relativism. How can you try and assert that a visit to Europe or the Middle East with the hundreds/thousands of years of history standing in front of you is somehow only equivalent to visiting a national park with some cave paintings? It doesn’t devalue aboriginal culture to be fascinated by structures from thousands of years ago and the history they embody.
Breasts.
“Then why are they just sitting there right in front of me?”
What you are seeing, ekw (#6), are constructions, hetero-erotic tits, uh, texts.
Free your mind from the enslavement of capitalist mythology.
Your fetishistic reification of this part of the human body is fostered by the essentially exploitative nature of bourgeois consciousness which seeks to commodify and exploit all objects in its purview.
I’ve got a paper on this coming out in ‘Meanjin’. I’ll give you a preview - for a modest sum.
PW, is that Pittsburgh’s most decorated poker blogger?
http://meangenepoker.blogspot.com/
These are his five desert island books:
The Desert Island Survival Handbook (Stranded Edition)
HELP! 1,001 Ways To Announce Over A Wide Area That You Need Assistance
The Big, Big, BIG Book of Hardcore Pornographic Images
The Porno Omnibus—1971-2005
The Compleat Pervert, Vol. I-VI... somehow it fits the photo.
Am I off topic?
Inurbanus, I just woke up, and I gotta tell ya I love the smell of the Modern Language Association in the morning! As they might say, Con(sex)ualization and the Male (faltered)Ego. They love really bad plays on words which they think are very clever. It’s like a gathering of inferior writers, wanabes, failures everywhere outside of academe. They learn the secret lingo, believe in the approved causes, wear the appropriate clothing, and talk absolute balderdash. They are the ones who will tell you that aboriginal culture is, in fact, superior to Western culture because it is more harmonious with the environment, which, as has been pointed out here, is bullshit.
It’s just the hoary Rousseauian myth of the Noble Savage, only now they try and make it respectable by backing it up with the new forensic anthropological assumptions about what humans were like before they began to farm and settle in towns about 12,000 years ago. I’ve heard this stuff from a lot of people, smart people who just want to believe in a better time that never was. It’s edenic thinking. They are nothing more than fudamentalists themselves, believing in something that can only be considered a myth. Earth was once a garden, etc.
Omigosh, I’m on topic!
For quite some time the left imposed a near perfect silence about the shocking conditions in many of the remote aboriginal communities.
Register discomfort about this tragic situation and you were sat in the corner with a KKK hat quicker than you could say ‘sit-down money’.
We owe a lot to guys like Noel Pearson who began to wonder why aborigines had to reject white materialism while their would-be champions fretted over tenure and quaffed shiraz.
Finally, the real questions are being asked.
ekw, pleased about your frisson.
The title of that article:
“Sitting Right in Front of Me”: Eroticised Discourse and the Commodification of Eros in Conservative Blogs
Inurbanus,
I looked at that title you put up there, and it’s perfect. In fact, it’s so good that I wasn’t sure for a bit if it wasn’t real. The MLA types would need a way to resolve the aporia (one of their favorite words) of evidently intelligent - if wrong-headed - people objectifying women’s gazongas. And, it’s exactly the way they would perceive two (or more) white (black and Hispanic, too, if the author was an iconoclast) males talking about chicks and their hot bo-days. They need a hermeneutics about that. And if you’ve never had a high hermeneutic, let me tell ya, bro, they hurt.
Aporia - Wonder and amazement before the confusing puzzles and paradoxes of our lives and of the universe. Socrates and the other ancient philosophers tried to evoke the philosophic spirit in young men by awakening their aporia, not by simply providing answers to these puzzles.
Nice one, ekw - thanks.
In Humanities Depts now you don’t wake the philosophic spirit; merely spread the dull manure of post-marxist nihilism.
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Depends where you looked. I recently stumbled across this public opinion survey from the mid-1980’s, a time of entrenched ALP Federal government as the survey confirmed. Note the most admired Australian, most admired non-Australian, and the attitudes to sporting boycotts against South Africa.