ORIGIN OF ORIGINALITY

Theodore Dalrymple rifs on originality, the 'holy grail' of the post-modern artist: 

"Compared with learning from the past, from taking what was best in it and using it to the greatest advantage to create the new, originality is a cheap and pointless goal:

[Originality] has come to poets....infinitely the inferior of Keats. Those who strive after direct originality forget that to be unlike those who have preceded us, in all the forms and methods of expression, is not by any means certainly to be either felicitous or distinguished.

Is that a lesson that one could say has been marked, learned and inwardly digested as my teachers used to demand of me, by todays artists, architects, writers and others?

The idea of originality is a complex and interesting one. I think that history [as in taking the best from] has a major part to play in the development of a creative culture and I believe that history is the subject most under attack by the deconstructionist-creative industrial complex.

 

 

MUSING ON CONNECTING THOUGHTS

A couple of unrelated[?] and obscure passages of text by two (with a brief mention of a third) diametrically opposed writers which I somehow feel the need to connect:

Out of the wound we pluck

The shrapnel. The thorns we squeeze

Out of the hand. Even poison forth we suck,

And after pain we have ease.

But images that grow

Within the soul have life

Like cancer and, often cut, live on below

The deepest of the knife,

Waiting their time to shoot

At some defenceless hour

Their poison, unimpaired, at the hearts root,......    [C S Lewis, Relapse]

And……………

We live in an age of the convenience of the moment, including or especially financial, when no sacrifice for the sake of aesthetics is deemed to be worth making. We do not build sub specie aeternitatis because we do not believe in eternity of any kind, spiritual, artistic, or cultural. Thus the ugliness of modern Europe is not the same as the ugliness of the past, a manifestation of poverty. It is the ugliness of a society in which people believe in nothing but their standard of living, as measured by their personal convenience and consumption. It is the ugliness of civilizational exhaustion.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer called it ‘personal peace and prosperity’, rather than ‘personal convenience and consumption’, though of course the good Dr. was a Christian and the writer Theodore Dalrymple, is a self-confessed atheist. Make of the difference what you will, the similarities however are telling as is some connection between the first and the last excerpts, I think?

 

 

THE ROAD TO FAME & FORTUNE

"The immediate consequence of the CIA torture ­report is a call for compensation for all detainees at Guantanamo.

The longer-term consequence is an even more dangerous world in which we lack the resolve to defend ourselves. You only have to look at the fate of the poor people of Syria and the persecuted Christians and Yazidis of Iraq to see where that leads."[M.D. 13.12.14]

This 'torture' report is so one-sided and biased that it makes you want to puke. It is little more than distortions and lies mixed in with some regrettable truths, but taken out of context and presented to a partisan 'committee' of infernal fifth columnists whose desire is to destroy everything they hate from the inside (ala Alinsky's 12 Rules for Radicals).

Unfortunately these infernal traitors are not only in America, but are alive and kicking in Australia as well.

Take this latest attack for example.....the 'siege of Lindt' in Sydney. The 'compassionata' (Left wing pollies, TV personalities and lame-stream-media) are all clambering for a quote; 'peaceful resolution'.

What the flaming heck!!!!!

This is anything but a 'peaceful act' on the part of the terrorist, because irrespective of whether he is associated with an 'official' terrorist cell or not, his actions are terrorising the innocent.

At the risk of being called a right-wing fascist might I observe that the quickest and least expensive option (in this age of cutbacks) would be to send a single, cheap, sniper round into the terr's left eye socket thus ending the siege 'peacefully', at least for those he has been terrorising.

Horror of horrors! screech the swooning Oprah acolytes.

Their 'peaceful solution' would be a cap-in-hand (by the authorities that is, not the terrorist) handover of the nations testicles to a glowering terrorist with his flag draped nonchalantly across his shoulders like a new, middle aged, Che Guevara; on camera, in front of a worldwide audience of luvvies, swiftly followed by Julian Burns offering his favours pro bono, an agent with a lucrative book deal, an ABC funded movie on the sinful actions of the society that drove him to it...all the while anticipating a rapid acquittal from some compliant, Green-voting, 'judge' on a spurious legal technicality resulting in not only legal action against the City of Sydney with an enormous 'out-of-court settlement' but the attendant glory of being feted at the writers festivals like his jihadist brother-in-arms; Mohammed Daw-hood a.k.a. David Hicks.

We- the silent conservative majority (shrinking) are our society's own worst enemy, and the real tragedy of this softly softly approach is that one day the fruit of such an approach will be that we will have no choice but to counter the bullies with extreme force and that many, many innocent youngsters are going to have to pay the ultimate price because of the moral cowardice of the few politicians and their philosophical apologists who hide behind their 'cowardly, false compassion'.

The lessons of the second world war have not been learned by this new generation. Surprise surprise, most children these days don't even know who Hitler was, never mind that his destruction of so many lives and the destruction of his own nation could have been short circuited by perspicacious and courageous individuals:

"....but because he believed the “miserable little worms” he opposed had no chance of defeating him. In that sense his behavior, as opposed to his principles, followed a rational-actor model of pushing until encountering firm resistence, then pushing a little longer to test the firmness.

Deterrence, in the general sense of establishing boundaries in “if-then” contexts, had corresponding potential for modifying Hitler’s behavior, at least in the short run. For deterrence to succeed, however, it requires a high level of coherence and coordination, backed by an objectively credible threat of force. Distracted and disarmed, Hitler’s opponents were unable to meet either criterion."*

* http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?zid=fedc918dbf15654a3326b8c41f9ec2e6&zid=fedc918dbf15654a3326b8c41f9ec2e6&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX2876400023&userGroupName=bonn54603&jsid=4e22e4a1c050967d87f52fca815de741

BLEATING AND BLAMING

Conservatives have surrendered the media and the arts to the reactionaries and are paying a high cost in the common man's weltanschauung. The Conservative base has also lost ground in the ongoing culture wars in the arena of education; in fact I think the radical left-wing sympathisers and unions have already captured the academic high-ground.
Of course the left-wing luvvies deny that this is the case because their 'bible' (Alinsky's; Rules For Radicals*) exhorts them to use this very method to allay the fears of the common man.
As for the truth of the matter consider the following example and make your own mind up:

Former ABC presenter Helen Razer asks Professor Stuart Macintyre to help bag Colebatch’s book attacking the sabotage of Australia’s war effort by communist-infiltrated unions:

Macintyre, an academic who works within the margins of evidence, is far less inclined than Carlton, a journalist whose mood becomes freer with every tweet, to call the award for Australia’s Secret War a numb act of pure ideology.

Missing from Razer’s interview is this highly relevant fact:  Macintyre was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of Australia, and at least six of his books are about Marxism and communism, including his paen to the party - The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia, from Origins to Illegality. Why wasn’t that disclosed?
Razer continues, using Macintyre to bag the idea that the Left hog academic positions and impose an intellectual orthodoxy in universities:

Macintyre puts it smoothly when he says, “The Right thinks there is this absolute orthodoxy within universities and historical scholarship.” “And in a sense it projects its own expectation of how matters are decided”.

This is grotesquely hypocritical. Razer fails to note Macintyre’s own role in one of the most shameful and sinister cases of the silencing of conservative academics. Keith Windschuttle describes the persecution of our greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey:

Moreover, Macintyre himself played a prominent role in a notorious case of academic persecution ... This was the successful campaign that put an end to the academic career of one of Australia’s greatest historians.
On May 19, 1984, the Age newspaper published a letter signed by twenty-four staff members of the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. The letter dissociated its authors from public views recently expressed by Geoffrey Blainey, the Ernest Scott Professor of History and head of that department. Blainey, the signatories claimed, had framed a debate over government immigration policy in such terms that would invite others to “incite feelings of racial hatred”:
“As historians at the University of Melbourne we wish to dissociate ourselves entirely from the widely-publicised attacks which Professor Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent member of our profession, and a professor in our department, has recently made on the Government’s immigration policy with regard to Asians. Professor Blainey speaks and writes on this issue as an individual and not as a representative of historians at this university.
“We are particularly aware of the dangers of trying to channel debate on immigration policy into consideration of the suitability of certain ethnic and national groups as immigrants. We are also aware, from many historical precedents, that raising such an issue in racial terms (however much it is couched in the language of reason) becomes an invitation to less responsible groups to incite feelings of racial hatred. Framing debate in such racial terms can become a potent weapon to rouse public fears and prejudices and to direct hostility at certain groups in our society.
“We do not wish to limit debate and discussion by Professor Blainey or anyone else on such issues of public concern. But to raise discussion of immigration in terms of race will inevitably draw in and encourage racist groups to come forward and claim legitimacy from what has been said.
“Signed by Ian Robertson [Renaissance historian, chairman of the department] and 23 others”
Two weeks later, at the start of the next teaching term, a group of students at the University of Melbourne picketed Blainey’s lectures and demonstrated against him. Although university security personnel locked the doors to the building concerned, they were unable to prevent the demonstrators gaining entry. Blainey was forced to cancel the lecture and others he planned to give. After that, university security concerns made it impossible for Blainey to speak at any public function on campus. All his scheduled talks at the university for the rest of the year were cancelled. Even towards the end of 1984, when the Students’ Representative Council invited him to give a lecture, the Vice-Chancellor prohibited it on grounds of security.
After members of his family were subject to threats of violence, Blainey removed his name and address from the public telephone book and a friend organised private security to guard his home. The university installed a special machine to inspect all incoming mail. The most disturbing incident, not publicised at the time by police for fear of provoking copycats, occurred when someone planted a real bomb on the lawn of another person named Blainey who lived close to Monash University. The immediate consequence of all this was that Blainey, easily Australia’s best and most prolific living historian, was effectively silenced from speaking at his own university. He reverted to an administrative role as Dean of Arts and did not lecture again in the history department until 1987. This violation of academic freedom, clearly the worst in Australian history, provoked no protest at all from the university’s academic staff association, nor from the university council, let along his own departmental colleagues. In 1988, Blainey resigned from the university. Once he was gone, Stuart Macintyre, one of the signatories of the original letter, succeeded to the now vacant Ernest Scott Chair of History.

How dare Razer not refer to this when quoting this same Macintyre denying a culture of Leftist orthodoxy in universities? [A.B. 11.12.14]

The conservatives in Australia, of which I am one, need to take some very swift and perhaps even radical action against these reactionary's of the left if anything of value is to remain in this country. We are at war as the above actions describe. Don't choose Chamberlain, be a Churchill.

Cut the ABC to the bone, cancel it outright if necessary because the need for a tax-payer funded, neo-Marxist propaganda arm is of no benefit to a 'free society'. Cut funding to the universities and make them compete on a level playing ground, radically trim the various bureaucracies, boot out ALL green carpet-baggers, stimulate the economy by CUTTING HANDOUTS AND TAXES, not the other way around. These are but a few suggestions to begin with. Such actions are not going to generate any more bile from the luvvies than the pitiful current cuts already are, and they might, just might, restore some hope to the despairing conservative voters who voted this current shower into office.

Unfortunately I fear that the current crop of politicians are all merely subtle shades of the same red colour (with a few exceptions).

Dare I predict that unless the tax paying, family oriented, freedom loving, seekers of natural justice, egalitarian, silent majority of Australia stand up and demand some bold and forthright action on the part of this so-called 'conservative' government....then the end of Australia as most want it or know it is closer than you think.

PS Many of these welded-on Labor luvvies are going to get a major shock if/when they actually get what they say they want. Then we are going to hear bleating and blaming on a scale never before imagined much less expected.

*http://www.bestofbeck.com/wp/activism/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals

PORK-PIE CENTRAL

Do you still believe in the untouchable objectivity of the professional scientist, particularly the 'climate scientist'?
Do you believe that these 'scientists' have embraced the very best practices of objectivity and honesty in using their renowned 'peer-review' processes?
If so; zen welcomen to ze cabaret my friend:

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the UN's IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed."

Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review." When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers."

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style.

DEADLY ASSISTANCE

I am reading another book by Theodore Dalrymple; a collection of essays written during the late 90's and early 2000's. And although I am always enraptured by his erudition and his dark humour, to call this book 'enjoyable' would be to stretch the truth. It is in fact rather frightening.

His life as a doctor and psychiatrist in a major English Hospital and the prison it serves, both of which are situated in the middle of a large English slum, has provided him with an insight into the human condition that rises above most (if not all) ‘academics’ whose intellectual ‘ruminations’ have caused many of the problems that he writes so eloquently about.
His observations provide an important illumination into the results of untrammelled welfare on the very people it was intended to help and is a sobering call-to-arms on the side of  the conservative perspective in the ‘culture wars’ that rage throughout Western  society:

“Life in the British slums demonstrates what happens when the population at large, and the authorities as well, lose all faith in a hierarchy of values. All kinds of pathology result: where knowledge is not preferable to ignorance and high culture to low, the intelligent and the sensitive suffer a complete loss of meaning. The intelligent self-destruct; the sensitive despair. And where decent sensitivity is not nurtured, encouraged, supported or protected, brutality abounds. The absence of standards, as Ortega y Gasset remarked, is the beginning of barbarism: and modern Britain is well past the beginning.” [Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom, 2001. P.166]

My own (decidedly less ‘expert’ but nonetheless empirical) observations when driving a night-time cab usually on weekends, was a wake-up call to a (at times), culturally closeted life experience.

Australia is rapidly heading down the same dark highways and to reflect on his essay’s is to catch a glimpse of the unenviable future; barring a significant shift in the cultural hegemony that is.

 

A COMMON CONTRADICTION

A fundamental proposition amongst post-modern thinkers on popular culture is that the seedy side of life is more authentic and ‘real/genuine’ than the refined and cultured side, and most certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side.

These ‘thought experiments’ from despoiled neo-Marxist ‘intellectuals’ have been force-fed into  the population by way of the socialist union dominated fields of education, the lame-stream-media and the stupid, unreflective narcissism of Hollywood and is a primary contributing factor to why so many ‘ordinary’ children have adopted what used to be the attitudes and accoutrements of the underbelly of civilisation.

That is; prideful ignorance, a lupine aggression aimed at any or all perceived authorities, bodily disfigurements previously restricted to particular gangs and groups, i.e. Tattoos and piercings, the debased use of language, casual cohabitation and the resultant ‘one parent household’ poverty trap, an orgy of senseless violence towards arbitrary others and usually motivated by extreme sensitivity of ego, and all of it undergirded by a dismissive air of deniability with regards to responsibility; it’s always ‘society’, or parents, or “he/she made me do it” or racism, homophobism, capitalism, or anyone of a myriad of reasons why the lawbreakers are not responsible for the choices they make.

“This I the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures form without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanch to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly”. [Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, 2000, p.122]