A Battle for the soul

The relentless attack on the Australian way of life is reaching a fever pitch. It has been played out on many fields, not least the journalistic and academic ones, and most recently it has manifested in the display of savage opposition to the Anzac tradition. This is not new however:

The attack on the Anzac legend began at the end of the Great War when the newly formed Communist Party of Australia tried to appropriate it for propaganda purposes. When that failed, it turned violently against it. The ideal of the Anzac easily swept aside the competing model of ‘Soviet Man’ that the Left wanted to impose on the Australian people. This was a major ideological defeat and the failure festered on the Left over the decades, provoking streams of invective against the tradition. This reached a torrent at times, especially during the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties (c.1965-74), when the icono­clastic rage of the Vietnam War era very nearly destroyed the Anzac tradition. Stigmatized, it was effectively driven underground. Meanwhile, the triumphant Left began its long march through academia and other vital institutions, entrenching its bleak ideological hegemony over our political, cultural and social life.

.....This period is dominated by the Left intelligentsia and the adversary culture that it nurtures and sustains. It sees itself as the champion of various victim groups, social causes, and the Third World. And it is fiercely iconoclastic, despising both Anzac and Australia,

Whereas the first period [1918-1960's] nurtured a nation-building narrative and sustained a unifying positive national identity, the present period is dominated by the divisive ‘black armband’ historical narrative of a genocidal and ecologically rapacious settler society, promoting a negative national identity based on guilt, shame, and despair. 

We in Australia are engaged in a culture war and its aims and objectives bode badly for the soul of the nation and the souls of its people. We cannot afford to lose for the latter reason.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/04/anzacs-determined-foes/

Student totalitarians

The avant garde of the totalitarian left is increasingly exemplified by the storm-troopers of the radical ego (oops Freudian slip!), eco-fanatics found in many Western University's. In the following article, their ideology manifests in strident and ominous stand-over tactics as they threaten the University establishment and call for economic disinvestment of everything that the fanatics believe conflicts with their worldview.

"It is sometimes difficult when confronted with seemingly noble causes to sweep aside the woolly minded clichés and grasp the substance of what is actually being discussed. The increasingly authoritarian inclinations of environmental groups is a case in point. No belief system, especially deep ecology, has a strong enough claim on the greater good that it should be entitled to decide how other people or institutions of higher learning spend their money. Nowhere does this ring more true than with repeated attempts by leftists to hijack state-funded education in order to pursue their own frolics of moral vanity." [John Slater]

 http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/04/green-shirts-campus/

Apartheid is back on the drawing board!

As an ex-South African and now proud Australian with family in Australia for more than 40 years, I pose the following question to ideologues of the left in today's Australia: "Do you (insert your names here............) believe that Apartheid was such a great and successful ideology that you are keen to establish it here in the 'lucky' country?

Those “original” inhabitants are now long dead. People today claiming to be “original inhabitants” claim that title not on the facts of their own lives, given that I and many other non-Aboriginal Australians of my age were here before they were, and are therefore chronologically more “originally” Australian.

No, Australians claiming to be the “original custodians” claim that by virtue of their “race” or genealogy - a line of connection to some of their ancestors, and only those who were Aboriginal. They asked to be judged by their “race”.

Read the full article here: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_australian_confirms_what_it_denies_this_constitutional_change_is_racist/

News from the outer limits of education.

Some more sad news out of Area 51 (the University Campus):

Wherever Possible, Avoid Mad People

For instance, people such as these: 

Stevenson College is apologising to its students for serving Mexican food during [a science fiction event]. In a letter sent out to students, the college apologised for having “a Mexican food buffet,” while also featuring spaceships and aliens.

Wait for it.

The college received complaints saying the combination was racist because of the association between Mexicans and illegal immigrants.

Despite eight years of doing this, I didn’t see that coming. Let’s take a second to check the algebra of umbrage: Science fiction event plus chili and burritos equals racism. 

After receiving complaints, Dr Carolyn Golz said that the event “demonstrated a cultural insensitivity on the part of the programme planners and, though it was an unintentional mistake, I recognise that this incident caused harm within our community and negatively impacted students.”

At this point, bear in mind that several students, our fearless intellectuals of tomorrow, have felt a need to publicly articulate some version of the following, rather staggering idea: “Dear Sir or Madam, I have been negatively impacted by your insensitive buffet.”  

Naturally, this explosion of WrongThought™ will have to be punished:

As a result, Dr Golz “will require cultural competence training for Programmes staff, in addition to implementing mechanisms for future programme planning that will ensure college programmes are culturally sensitive and inclusive.”

In the wake of this terrifyingly racist punch in the face of decency, expressed via the medium of reheated beans, Dr Golz urges students to report any further incidents of “hate” to the university’s Report Hate website, and thereby “cut down on insensitive events like Intergalactic Night.” 

Update, via the comments: 

And so, once again, students are being encouraged to cultivate a kind of pretentious racial paranoia, in which almost any innocuous thing can, via mental convolution, be associated with some pretext for grievance, however dishonest and opportunistic. Once some mental association has been discovered or contrived, everyone must act as if the innocuous object or action were in reality malicious and/or wounding, whatever the actual intention and regardless of how absurd and/or dishonest the claim of grievance is. Because whatever association of things is in the accuser’s head is assumed to be in everyone else’s head too.

And lo, grammar and punctuation are deemed racist, and paper coffee cups too. And hair, and genteel gardening programmes. And beards, on white men, areharmful and oppressive, and “glorify behaviours typical of people in white hegemonies.”

Yes, it’s ludicrous and pernicious, and not at all accidental. Dr Golz and her peers are in effect saying to students, “You should want to be the guy who bitches about the alleged racist subtext of party snacks. And if you do choose to behave that way, we’ll reward you and flatter you and make you feel important, while making other people jump through clown hoops to appease the feelings you pretend to have.” And the more implausible and contrived the claim of victimhood is, the more status points accrue, supposedly on account of the complainant’s heightened sensitivity and mental prowess. He has fathomed an injustice mere mortals cannot see.

And bewildered onlookers are expected to pretend that this is a high and noble function of an academic institution

Frack off Greenies

Lets get the fracking details correct, for frack's sake:

"In my home state of Western Australia, where commercial extraction of unconventional gas is in its infancy, fracking has been used in explor­ation since the 1950s and more than 780 wells have been safely fracked. Around the globe, more than two million wells have been fracked, most in the US. Access to onshore gas in the US has been credited with supporting the country’s economic recovery and has reduced carbon dioxide emissions back to 1996 levels…

The state’s Department of Mines and Petroleum says it knows of no scientifically proven case of fracking causing aquifer contamination in any country.

Whereas anti-fracking groups claim high well failure rates, credible US sources suggest the figures are much lower: 0.04 per cent failures after a year and 0.06 per cent after 30 years. Of recorded well failures, I am ­informed all have been minor, close to the surface and easily ­remediated.

This is the type of information that needs to be put forward to balance the public discussion and enable sensible consideration of a potential power source. The industry needs to respond to genuine concerns about fracking.

The unconventional gas industry has been largely missing in action — apparently unable to counter the rapid flow of alarming, skewed and misinformed ­arguments put by its opponents… Communication is critical and presently it all seems to be coming from one side of the debate." [Norman Moore]

To seem is greater than to be!

Some more from the 'seeming is greater than doing' brigade...............

"There was a time when Britain had a form of Christianity in which pride was considered a sin. Maybe that is part of why some of us find all this virtue signalling obnoxious. It’s just showing off. For some of us it is both ridiculous and irritating that people who say that they hate Ukip actually believe they are being more virtuous than others who visit the sick, give money to charity or are kind to someone lonely. But the widespread way in which people now proudly boast suggests there is no shame, no reflection. And because of this lack of awareness, it is more common. Twitter lends itself very well to virtue signalling, since it is much easier to express anger and scorn in 140 characters than to make a reasoned argument. Russell Brand is perhaps the ultimate incarnation of modern virtue signalling. He is bursting with anger and outrage. My goodness he must be good!"

Read the article:
 http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9501282/hating-the-daily-mail-is-a-substitute-for-doing-good/

Essential differences

An interesting take on the difference between Liberal and Conservative perspectives on art:

"Few have ever died of bad art, or of bad art criticism. This is why the stakes in politics, philosophy, economics and so forth are simply that much higher. But there's another danger, too. When art is elevated to the status of an autonomous enterprise which can be expected to deliver (rather than reflect) insight, moral guidance and even a species of revelation, it starts to look an awful lot like something else which, poignantly, has diminished in stature in exactly the times and places where art (in this autonomous sense) has grown — which is to say, religious faith. And this, ultimately, is my main objection to the way in which Kimball appears to understand art. The tendency to turn culture into an ersatz religion — complete with its own shibboleths and sacred texts, ritual spaces and priestly hierarchy, its own doctrines of election and salvation, its own tones of sanctimony and self-righteousness — is an inheritance from a particular strand of nineteenth century Liberalism that is deeply embedded in all the Anglophone cultures, but it is for that very reason something that conservatives ought, really, to regard with antipathy.

Ultimately, and perhaps unfairly, Kimball's understanding of art strikes me as fundamentally Liberal, rather than conservative. There ought to be more to cultural conservatism, after all, than defending as eternal truth an understanding of cultural endeavour not much older than our own great grandparents' copies of Culture and Anarchy — let alone an understanding no older than that other great figure who once passed amongst the shady groves of Yale and Bennington:

[Art is] a matter of self-evidence and feeling, and of the inferences of feeling, rather than of intellection or information, and the reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

As anyone who has ever been moved by a picture can tell you, Clement Greenberg had a point — as well as, needless to say, a degree of engagement in politics, and in life more broadly, that could surprise only his stupidest detractors — but no monopoly on truth.

 http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/what-is-conservative-art-criticism-3698

Green slime

More indoctrination in the name of 'education'...read This Tattooed Land, by Derek Parker people!

"Education ministers do not seem troubled that a green propaganda machine, Cool Australia, has garnered the support of thousands of teachers and schools, happily peddling slick scare campaigns and nudging students towards its militant allies and dark-green partners. If governments won't object, maybe parents should.

Australian schools are handing over the all-pervasive ‘sustainability’ syllabus to a militant green organisation, Cool Australia, whose curriculum material and projects have enjoyed a red-carpet ride into the state and private education systems, with accolades from the Australian Education Union and the Independent Education Union."

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/04/get-em-young-make-em-green/

Devolving barry....

This space-cadet is giving morons a bad name:

It is frightening that Barack Obama thinks our global warming emissions - essentially carbon dioxide - have anything at all to do with asthma: 

President Obama said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that his push to address climate change has been partly influenced by a frightening moment when his daughter Malia had an asthma attack as a 4-year-old.

“What I can relate to is the fear a parent has, when your 4-year-old daughter comes up to you and says, ‘Daddy, I’m having trouble breathing.’ The fright you feel is terrible,” the president said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Wednesday.

“And if we can make sure that our responses to the environment are reducing those incidents, that’s something that I think every parent would wish for.”

Asthma sufferer Eric Worrall: 

...by far the worst trigger for asthma attacks which I encountered was extreme cold. Heat waves cause deaths – but cold is far worse. Death rates soar in winter. The suggestion that milder winters in the future might be a public health threat is absurd.

Green Dystopia

I have just finished reading This Tattooed Land by Derek Parker, a dystopian novel about the take-over of Australia by a Green Government and the results of their policies. It is sobering and a rather clever attempt to take the philosophies of the Green movement to their logical conclusions.

Anyone who has Green leanings and not given much thought to the unintended consequences thereof should rush out and buy it immediately, as should all who have any sympathy whatsoever for the Gaian religion.

Tribal bloodlines

An interesting book I have recently read (I have read all of Wolfe's books, well worth it to any other bibliophiles out there) and the crux of it as summed up by a TV interviewer:

the central leitmotif of Wolfe’s latest book, Back to Blood:

A phrase pops into his head from out of nowhere. “Everybody… all of them… it’s back to blood! Religion is dying… but everybody still has to believe in something. It would be intolerable— you couldn’t stand it— to finally have to say to yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition means blindly, irrationally, doesn’t it. So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. ‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds— Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice but— Back to blood!

Read more: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/#ixzz3WUgvx4R2

Middle-land

If anything, I keep this post to remember interesting quotes that crop up from time to time, this is an important one:

John Moulton was a distinguished judge, a man of science, and a chap who held the splendid title during the Great War of Britain's "director-general of explosive supplies," a job he did brilliantly. Lord Moulton divided society into three sectors, of which he considered the most important to be the "middle land" between law and absolute freedom — the domain of manners, in which the individual has to be "trusted to obey self-imposed law." "To my mind," wrote Moulton, "the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land." By that measure, our greatness is shriveling fast: The land of self-regulation has been encroached on remorselessly, to the point where we increasingly accept that everything is either legal or illegal, and therefore to render any judgment of our own upon the merits of this or that would be presumptuous.