Sunday 28 June 2015

Stupefyingly hypocritical!

Stupefyingly hypocritical!

This is my observation of the cognitive dissonance behind the thoughts(?) of Fairfax columnist Clementine Ford. She is undoubtedly one of the more abusive, dismissive, expletive laden and just downright disrespectful writers in Australia today. Her ideologically loaded prose is barely decipherable before you encounter the meretricious use of obscenities, usually expressing one favoured obscenity alternatively in the same sentence as; adjective, noun, verb, pronoun, proper noun etc. Perhaps the poor lass is the unfortunate recipient of an inferior public-school education, thus rendering her vocabulary devoid of comprehensive choices?  Whatever! The  reason for this blog however, is that it is this same gentle female who in an aggrieved tone complains that using such language hurts.

She is obviously not only lexically challenged but philosophically as well.
“I would like to say that words have consequences and abuse is not a joke.” – Clementine Ford discovers that abusive language is actually abusive after becoming the target of obscene threats and attacks on Facebook.
What was it the good book says about reaping and sowing?

Thursday 25 June 2015

Beware Nietzsche's chasm!


A very important article for those of us who are involved in popular cultural and philosophical questions. An excerpt:
"As each generation passes, we forget something essential — if intangible—about ou rselves. With the final breath of every dying person, some small spirit of the age escapes irretrievably into the air.
Throughout history, civilisations have compensated for this loss by stowing their shared memories in communal institutions. But today, for perhaps the first time in history, large chunks of our culture appear indifferent, even hostile, to their own past.
Look, for instance, at the art world. For many centuries, the West’s artistic traditions were held among its most precious assets, for they conveyed — by melody and brushstroke — so many things otherwise inexpressible about who we are. But at the beginning of the 20th century, culture suddenly took a different turn: artists, no longer content simply to loosen the ties and top buttons of convention, stripped themselves completely, doused their clothes in petrol, and set them alight.
Swept by the modernism surging through Europe’s veins, they sought to overturn and recreate everything anew. Declaring their own traditions irrelevant, they butchered them. Schoenberg irrevocably scrambled tonality. Duchamp scribbled a moustache on the Mona Lisa. 
 Today, radical artists are left scouring through the embers, still looking for last traces of life. Their primary target is now the taboo — the unspoken memory of a once-communal system of values. Tracey Emin shows us her unmade bed, strewn with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Damien Hirst suggests that the 9/11 hijackers “need congratulating”. Every last inherited standard — every last comfort — must be torn from us once and for all.
But by trying so hard to wipe its own memory, art comes perilously close to losing its sense of self altogether. Once the shocks no longer shock, what does it stand for? A few generations after the narcotic highs of modernism, the art world has left itself largely brain-dead.
This tragedy acts as a miniature simulation of just how easily — and quickly — cultures can wither away. And it ought to alarm us to see the same pattern emerging right across Western society.

 http://standpointmag.co.uk/critique-july-august-2015-kit-wilson-sentimental-nihilist-and-popular-culture

Tuesday 23 June 2015

The long fingernail brigade....

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum......:

"Six days ago, Sir Tim [Professor Sir Tim Hunt, FRS.Nobel Laureate]  was in Seoul for some science conference and was required to make a few remarks, among which was a septuagenarian scientist's ill advised attempt at humor:
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.
Not the funniest joke in the world, but the genius of a scientist is often inversely proportional to his social ease. So he did not anticipate that a throwaway line about how girls are so emotional about these things would result in the girls getting so emotional about these things."
While he was on the flight back to London, University College told his wife, Professor Mary Collins (herself a prominent immunologist), that he could quit or be sacked. So he was forced to resign - from University College, and then from the Royal Society's Biological Sciences Awards Committee, and then from the European Research Council. There's not a lot left for him to resign from, although the Armies of the Outraged are optimistic they can get the Royal Society to expel him entirely. 
What is our culture doing to itself that we would allow such a travesty to take place?

We have reached the position historian Rodney Starck talks about when he declares that the the will to develop is equally important (perhaps even more?) than the development of the things themselves.

Our culture is busily destroying its will to progress (and most likely its survival!) because of a minority of shrill anarchists who want to rule unimpeded by democracy or mere good manners, just like the mandarins of the Imperial court of China:
Once we recognise the primacy of ideas, we realise the irrelevance of long-running scholarly debates about whether certain inventions were developed independently in Europe or imported from the East. The act of invention is obviously crucial, but just as important, societies must value innovations enough to use them. The Chinese for example, developed gunpowder very early on -  but centuries later they still lacked artillery and firearms. An iron industry flourished in northern China in the eleventh century - but then mandarins at the Imperial court declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything, destroying China's iron production." (R Starck, How the West Won, pg.5)
UPDATE....an epilogue by Mark Steyn:
"As I've said, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. What I found interesting was the instant demand for Tim Hunt's resignation, but the comparative ease with Rachel Dolezal's years of deception - not to say the vigorous pushback by the expert that she's more black than Clarence Thomas. Ms Dolezal may be white, but Sir Tim is beyond the pale."
.....and more evidence to indicate how stupid America (thus Western culture!) is becoming:
~Speaking of historical vandalism, an "award-winning" teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District has been suspended since March for reading Mark Twain to his class - specifically, this passage from Huckleberry Finn:
At last, when he'd built up everyone's expectations high enough, he rolled up the curtain. The next minute the king came prancing out on all fours, naked. He was painted in rings and stripes all over in all sorts of colors and looked as splendid as a rainbow.
Another teacher heard about it and complained. Presumably it's a "micro-aggression" and the pupils might be "triggered". The moronization of the republic is remorseless.

Thursday 18 June 2015

Natural phenomena

What an incredible rock specimen............the leopard skin boulder!

Tuesday 9 June 2015

Tut tut, pecksniffery and podsnappianism be damned!

My original impulse when beginning this blog was significantly motivated by a desire to preserve interesting snippets of information for myself as well as communicating interesting/informative/inspirational snippets for others to enjoy. In a spirit more of the former (though I hope reaching out to the latter) I submit this example of Dalrymples incomparable erudition:

Here, for example, is the profile of a man who has made a career of campaigning for health as a human right. I won’t mention his name because it is not my intention to be personally vindictive; but the article comes with a small photograph of him that exudes Podsnappian self-satisfaction. I couldn’t help noticing, also, that he wears a nasty dark-blue shirt with an olive green tie, as if no truly good man could dress with taste. Dressing badly, though not too badly, shows that you have more important things on your mind.
The subject of this admiring profile is said to be “quite outspoken but not too confrontational.” He gave a speech at the United Nations that, according to the man himself, “was as punchy as I can be within the rules both spoken and unspoken.” The quintessence of apparatchikism. He decided, 15 years before the article was published, that, as a human rights lawyer, “he needed to expand the traditional boundaries of his calling”—more or less to include everything. There is a kind of grandiosity about this that produces in me a similar effect as that my teachers used to produce when they had a piece of defective chalk that squeaked on the blackboard. Here is a man so perfect, so moral, so well-intentioned, so benevolent towards humanity, that he feels he has the right—no, the duty, the calling—to lay down the world’s agenda.

rights. http://takimag.com/article/a_dull_lancet_theodore_dalrymple/print#ixzz3cX62D1Bq

Eco fraudsters

Environmental organisations ceased a long time ago to be about the environment. 
"The Sierra Club, which took a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum to be pro-illegal immigration, never said a word about it. Nothing the Sierra Club says about immigration -- or the environment -- can be believed." (A.C. 3.6.15)

Similarly Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace left because of the take-over of the organisation by those more inclined towards political power than eco concerns:
"He quit Greenpeace in 1986 after 15 years as a co-founder, saying the organisation had become anti-science and anti-human." (T. Thomas, Quadrant, Oct 28, 2014)

Recused!

The New York Times was saved from bankruptcy by one of the richest men in the world, Mexican Carlos Slim, whose fortune comes from illegal aliens' sending money -- most of it from the U.S. taxpayer -- back to Mexico...ergo; anything the Times says on immigration ought to be treated like a press release from a tobacco company about the low risk of disease from smoking. [A Coulter]

Logology

Conversation in the street outside the Springvale Islamic centre:

“Ay-I-Tell-Ya what the furkan ell is goin’ on inside the Al Furkan mosque…furkan insurrection, I furkan tell ya!”