Thursday, 29 April 2010
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Odd little film called Incendiary
British Film. All about a terrorist attack on London. Specifically about one woman's emotional journey through the aftermath of the events, so obviously not very good. I see from the internets that the woman in it isn't a typical east end slapper, to quote the fillum, but an American film star formerly in Species as the kid and in the TV series Dawson's Creek, as the blonde one.
Nonsense, mostly. Reminds me of Silent Hill, which is an awful film.
A couple of pieces of interest, though. Firstly, to cut a long story short, the head of the Met anti-Terror branch turns out to have known all about the attack in advance and to have LIHOP, if not MIHOP. Film too busy with emotional journeys to bother with a plot. Secondly, at one point she's sat in a tube station when the tannoy announces that all trains have been cancelled "due to a power surge at King's Cross". Those of us who were watching the news on 7/7 will remember that the original explanation for the explosions was a power surge causing the explosion of transformers in the railway power system. It is, of course, a common trope in conspiracy circles that initial reports reflect the truth which has yet to be concealed by the slick PR operation of the real terrorists behind the attack.
Nonsense, mostly. Reminds me of Silent Hill, which is an awful film.
A couple of pieces of interest, though. Firstly, to cut a long story short, the head of the Met anti-Terror branch turns out to have known all about the attack in advance and to have LIHOP, if not MIHOP. Film too busy with emotional journeys to bother with a plot. Secondly, at one point she's sat in a tube station when the tannoy announces that all trains have been cancelled "due to a power surge at King's Cross". Those of us who were watching the news on 7/7 will remember that the original explanation for the explosions was a power surge causing the explosion of transformers in the railway power system. It is, of course, a common trope in conspiracy circles that initial reports reflect the truth which has yet to be concealed by the slick PR operation of the real terrorists behind the attack.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Friday, 16 April 2010
Notes
Notes on various things I'm too lazy to write long pieces about.
The three inevitabilities, appropriate for a Triad, all equal and untrue: whigism, fukuyamaism and marxism. The truth denied: history is not a procession to the inevitable, but a struggle between people and a war between classes.
The free market, which grants a vote to each dollar rather than a vote to each man. All things are of the market, we are told. It is undeniable, immutable, beyond the power of the state or democracy. Yet... it is always, supposedly under threat. To be destroyed by even the slightest rise in taxes, unless on the poor, or regulations, not counting those on personal conduct. But are these not functions of the market? Some say that the boycott of Nestle, now longstanding, is a market mechanism of redressment, showing that regulation is unnecessary. Others say it is an infringement of the market. No-one thinks a trade union is a legitimate market mechanism. But sure the joining of people into voluntary associations to enhance their market power is just as much a function of the market as the increased milk production of the bovine is a function of evolution. But don't get me onto selfish genes. A thought: maybe it's all just an attempt to subvert democracy and establish a monopoly on the usage of collective economic force?
Hill forts! I was listening to a programme on the TV, or possibly listening to the radio, and I came across some bugger claiming hill forts weren't put in place for defensive purposes, but were habitual abodes and settlements. Problems: most of them had no water source, within them have been discovered a disproportionate number of ballista bolts and murdered corpses, for example a man buried with a ballista bolt head in his spine. I might just have accepted "palace" or that archaeological favourite "ritual site", but not village. Also we only have the evidence of their use as a fortification. Sites of settlement tend to be reused, as do forts. Archaeology shows the hill forts to have been refortified during the sub-Roman period, history records their use by "clubbers" in the civil war, gangs of labourers who just wanted both sides to stay away from their land. Could be they were used by the Belgae tribes on incomers as a position of dominance for prestige, the storage and monopolisation of agricultural surplus and intimidation of peasants, like later norman castles.
Something about eoliths being dismissed by modern scientists as the greeks dismissed heliocentrism supposedly because of their attachment to their social organisation, for which the saw the heavens as an analogy. As the modern fundie haters reject the vedic hypothesis because it smells like creationism. An absurd bit of creationism: the supposed fall of Western lactose intolerance. Evolution is supposedly driven by the extinction of those with inferior genetic traits. Do we think that majority of the population which must originally have been lactose intolerant were at such a disadvantage, although not amongst the Chinese for some reason, that they died out? No. More likely those who drank a bit of milk found their genetics changing to meet the situation. Man makes himself.
Narcopederasts. The taleban were, of course, first thrust to power on the wave of revulsion at paedophile warlords. Then they stamped out the drug trade. Then the Americans bombed them. Probably unrelated facts.
dc peter cook - islington paedo ring -- every islington home involved - islington source of children for pron - islington children taken to jersey -- hodge head of islington - blamed bribing joirnos -- hocquart - will fraud - guernsey and britain - his friend rabet -- rabet deputy super of islinton care home - jersey care worker - too children to jersey - more will fraud - inherited sussex manor from oil millionairess made care home w/ clack + hpcquart -- two other jersey associates working for islington -- goldip - islingro now ofsted -- portsmouth
Darwinism in shakespear and the original sources of his stories. Particularly MacBeth, I like a bit of 11th century saga.
The common law stopped slavery here. Somersett case. New laws to relegalise in Virginia, etc..
There's quite a bit of Templar graffiti at newark, lincoln, brueria. Confessions by them were probably correct, as no torture was employed on them in England.
Election by lot in greece and bible (Acts), that's real democracy. Should be brought in at local level immediately. No theft to be going on then. No more rape by charles lynton, bush, so forth.
Current method od democracy, gladiatorial, just theatre. See fall of arbenz, war was entirely fake, invasion reported on radio was entirely fictitious. See recent Afghan attack on non-existent city. Marja? "Fort tungsten."
Boyard the blind horse. School field with sleeper in it. Horse rippers with tomahawks in local paper. Stuarts, masons, castle tunnels, air raid shelters.
Too much education, brainwashing, makes people monocultured, aquinos mindwar to extend to adults and foreigners, education to certify people for lazy employers, meritocracy a curse upon the weak, a renunciation of humanity by the strong,
The three inevitabilities, appropriate for a Triad, all equal and untrue: whigism, fukuyamaism and marxism. The truth denied: history is not a procession to the inevitable, but a struggle between people and a war between classes.
The free market, which grants a vote to each dollar rather than a vote to each man. All things are of the market, we are told. It is undeniable, immutable, beyond the power of the state or democracy. Yet... it is always, supposedly under threat. To be destroyed by even the slightest rise in taxes, unless on the poor, or regulations, not counting those on personal conduct. But are these not functions of the market? Some say that the boycott of Nestle, now longstanding, is a market mechanism of redressment, showing that regulation is unnecessary. Others say it is an infringement of the market. No-one thinks a trade union is a legitimate market mechanism. But sure the joining of people into voluntary associations to enhance their market power is just as much a function of the market as the increased milk production of the bovine is a function of evolution. But don't get me onto selfish genes. A thought: maybe it's all just an attempt to subvert democracy and establish a monopoly on the usage of collective economic force?
Hill forts! I was listening to a programme on the TV, or possibly listening to the radio, and I came across some bugger claiming hill forts weren't put in place for defensive purposes, but were habitual abodes and settlements. Problems: most of them had no water source, within them have been discovered a disproportionate number of ballista bolts and murdered corpses, for example a man buried with a ballista bolt head in his spine. I might just have accepted "palace" or that archaeological favourite "ritual site", but not village. Also we only have the evidence of their use as a fortification. Sites of settlement tend to be reused, as do forts. Archaeology shows the hill forts to have been refortified during the sub-Roman period, history records their use by "clubbers" in the civil war, gangs of labourers who just wanted both sides to stay away from their land. Could be they were used by the Belgae tribes on incomers as a position of dominance for prestige, the storage and monopolisation of agricultural surplus and intimidation of peasants, like later norman castles.
Something about eoliths being dismissed by modern scientists as the greeks dismissed heliocentrism supposedly because of their attachment to their social organisation, for which the saw the heavens as an analogy. As the modern fundie haters reject the vedic hypothesis because it smells like creationism. An absurd bit of creationism: the supposed fall of Western lactose intolerance. Evolution is supposedly driven by the extinction of those with inferior genetic traits. Do we think that majority of the population which must originally have been lactose intolerant were at such a disadvantage, although not amongst the Chinese for some reason, that they died out? No. More likely those who drank a bit of milk found their genetics changing to meet the situation. Man makes himself.
Narcopederasts. The taleban were, of course, first thrust to power on the wave of revulsion at paedophile warlords. Then they stamped out the drug trade. Then the Americans bombed them. Probably unrelated facts.
dc peter cook - islington paedo ring -- every islington home involved - islington source of children for pron - islington children taken to jersey -- hodge head of islington - blamed bribing joirnos -- hocquart - will fraud - guernsey and britain - his friend rabet -- rabet deputy super of islinton care home - jersey care worker - too children to jersey - more will fraud - inherited sussex manor from oil millionairess made care home w/ clack + hpcquart -- two other jersey associates working for islington -- goldip - islingro now ofsted -- portsmouth
Darwinism in shakespear and the original sources of his stories. Particularly MacBeth, I like a bit of 11th century saga.
The common law stopped slavery here. Somersett case. New laws to relegalise in Virginia, etc..
There's quite a bit of Templar graffiti at newark, lincoln, brueria. Confessions by them were probably correct, as no torture was employed on them in England.
Election by lot in greece and bible (Acts), that's real democracy. Should be brought in at local level immediately. No theft to be going on then. No more rape by charles lynton, bush, so forth.
Current method od democracy, gladiatorial, just theatre. See fall of arbenz, war was entirely fake, invasion reported on radio was entirely fictitious. See recent Afghan attack on non-existent city. Marja? "Fort tungsten."
Boyard the blind horse. School field with sleeper in it. Horse rippers with tomahawks in local paper. Stuarts, masons, castle tunnels, air raid shelters.
Too much education, brainwashing, makes people monocultured, aquinos mindwar to extend to adults and foreigners, education to certify people for lazy employers, meritocracy a curse upon the weak, a renunciation of humanity by the strong,
The voice of history
One of the less desirable outcomes of the rise of pseudo-Marxist and supposedly left wing scholarship has been the fall of the so-called Great Man theory of history. History, we are told, is the study and grand movements of people and faceless impersonal forces. Individuals have been presented as unimportant. The traditional matter of history, the stories and tales of the race, have been disregarded.
No wonder people no longer seem to be interested. History is statistics, the mathematics of agricultural production and immigration figures. As any fule know, no-one's interested in maths.
Like physics, history has been presented as a science, the study of meat machines and what they do. Unlike most things Marxist, this may even be one that Marx would have approved of.
Marx believed in progress. He believed humanity evolved from lower political and economic states to higher, as from lower to higher biological states. He believed the bourgeois democratic state would lead inevitably to an eventual socialist state, via the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx believed history progressed like clockwork, that this was unavoidable. And he was wrong.
He wasn't the only one. Come the twentieth century and a man called Herbert Butterfield, a historian, a writer of books including the Whig Interpretation of History. This was a critical tome, designed to attack the eponymous school of historical thought. The Whigs, he claimed, and the whig historians, looked at history and saw a progress from lower to higher, the stately progress and ascent of man from the brute beasts to our own heavenly and exalted state, specifically the highest achievements of humanity: the perfect form of government in the person of the then King Emperor of England and his ministers and parliament; the perfect religion in the high church Anglican confession; the perfect social order, that of an English county.
And now we think they were quaint. Even their name, the Whigs, has fallen by the wayside. Consequently Butterfield's book has followed them into the outer darkness of obscurity, but he was right. The name Whig is gone, the specifically whig aspects of their interpretation of history have been binned, history goes on. History still thinks of itself the same way, still thinks of the world the same way.
The church of England isn't as popular as it was. The monarchy isn't as popular as it was. The less said about parliament and the country scene the better. Kings die, crowns go on.
One Franny Fukuyama, Ender and Continuator of History. Seems like a bit of a footnote now, after 9/11 supposedly disproved his hypothesis, but his main point was that history has led to where we are now inevitably, progressively. That liberal democracy and capitalism are the pinacles of human achievement and will remain insurmountable, both beyond challenge and impossible of betterment.
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Most unpleasantly this has become the ruling orthodoxy of modern life and society. Not only inevitable but desirable. An evil system called meritocracy has conquered the minds of men. Ironically the fall of a history based on the individual has led to a present the conception of which is dominated by narrow and selfish interests.
Man makes himself. Even those things we think of as nature are second nature, things we have picked up after birth, as the otter, wettest of rodents, has to be taught to swim and to overcome a natural aversion to water.
A man whose mind has been fertilised with the stories of his past may base himself upon the heroes of his lineage and nation, someone treated like a meat machine will think of himself as a meat machine. A vehicle for that smallest of free marketeers, the selfish gene.
Everything is alleged to be a function of the free market. The field of microeconomics came about to give pseudoacademic rationalisations to what was previously considered common sense. The actions of individuals were measured by game theory, a theory designed by a paranoid schizophrenic to describe the actions and motivations of humanity and only adhered to by psychopaths and the crazed immoral race of economists.
Some problems present themselves with this theory, although facts rarely derail a friendly theory. Those economic phenomenae known as barriers to the market, long forbidden by various international treaty, are supposedly counter to the doctrine of self-interest. International treaties, by this interpretation are in place to save peoples from themselves. Peoples who are remarkably ungrateful. Democracy, the holy self-government of the people, consistently provides obstacles ot the movements of the market. If all things were functions of the market this would be no problem, people acting collectively to withhold their labour, the boycott products or to bring about redistributive taxation would merely be seen as joining together to strengthen their market power, to bring about what they wanted at a price they are willing to pay, for universal health care for example. But some bargains and transactions are market, some aren't.
The ones that aren't are those which don't fit the idea some try to put across of the relations between people. If someone becomes a blackleg and betrays his union during a strike it's his self-interest. If someone tries to protect his job by joining a strike it's an obstruction and impediment to the market.
The anti-democratic activities of the plutocrat represent the real distortion of the market.
Meritocracy, so-called, doesn't describe how things are but how it is convenient to pretend they are. Those who attain positions of power through deceit and proceed to use their power to commit theft, such as MPs, pretend they are the most deserving in society. Nothing is so distasteful as to hear someone complaining that if he wasn't so well paid we would face the terrible hardship of making do with a lesser individual in the role. All the more distasteful to hear such rubbish from those whose position gives them power indepedent of wealth, such as MPs.
A healthy recompense, and here the facts will bare me out, doesn't have the psychological impact its beneficiaries would like the believe. To misuse a metaphor, wages above a subsistence level aren't filling a pot but lighting, and fueling, a fire. Greed, in this case, rather than the lust for knowledge.
The word was coined by Michael Young, writer behind the election manifesto of the Labour party in 1945. He had intended his satire "The Rise of the Meritocracy" to be a warning to the future. The future obligingly neglected it. The word caught on with the ignorant and malevolently inclined, though.
As we can now see real history isn't the story of progression ever upwards to the system most desirable to the rulers of today. History is a weapon. As Orwell said, those who control the past control the present.
A weapon in the class war. The eternal war. The one they try to convince us isn't happening. We, you see, are cattle.
Fort: I suspect that, after all, we're useful -- that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us -- all others warned off -- that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness.
Yes, I don't doubt. Also, the blue ones. Clever man, that Fort. And Shaver. Vermin from Space. Different matter, maybe later.
War, not what one expects between sheep and wolf. Too one sided. But us, very dangerous herd. Most dangerous game. Even angels scared. More scared of use than we are of them, even though we haven't got stings. Nobel prize. Economic one, not even a proper nobble. Not that the real ones are better.
I think there are some who realise that humanity provides food. I think that they eat our adulation. I think shaven-headed Britney was a milk maid. From us she extracted what her masters feed upon. I think there is something which uses us for their power, and uses its power to keep us down, with the help of its overseers. No doubt the overseers see such power and join the brotherhood fo the brown trouser. They haven't got stings, or at least not that they know of. So, they decide, better to be a master in hell than a servant in heaven. It is our manifest destiny, you see, to be foodstuffs. Everyone is after us. We must be really important.
Vox pop, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. The breath of God animates man. The Word of God became man.
No wonder people no longer seem to be interested. History is statistics, the mathematics of agricultural production and immigration figures. As any fule know, no-one's interested in maths.
Like physics, history has been presented as a science, the study of meat machines and what they do. Unlike most things Marxist, this may even be one that Marx would have approved of.
Marx believed in progress. He believed humanity evolved from lower political and economic states to higher, as from lower to higher biological states. He believed the bourgeois democratic state would lead inevitably to an eventual socialist state, via the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx believed history progressed like clockwork, that this was unavoidable. And he was wrong.
He wasn't the only one. Come the twentieth century and a man called Herbert Butterfield, a historian, a writer of books including the Whig Interpretation of History. This was a critical tome, designed to attack the eponymous school of historical thought. The Whigs, he claimed, and the whig historians, looked at history and saw a progress from lower to higher, the stately progress and ascent of man from the brute beasts to our own heavenly and exalted state, specifically the highest achievements of humanity: the perfect form of government in the person of the then King Emperor of England and his ministers and parliament; the perfect religion in the high church Anglican confession; the perfect social order, that of an English county.
And now we think they were quaint. Even their name, the Whigs, has fallen by the wayside. Consequently Butterfield's book has followed them into the outer darkness of obscurity, but he was right. The name Whig is gone, the specifically whig aspects of their interpretation of history have been binned, history goes on. History still thinks of itself the same way, still thinks of the world the same way.
The church of England isn't as popular as it was. The monarchy isn't as popular as it was. The less said about parliament and the country scene the better. Kings die, crowns go on.
One Franny Fukuyama, Ender and Continuator of History. Seems like a bit of a footnote now, after 9/11 supposedly disproved his hypothesis, but his main point was that history has led to where we are now inevitably, progressively. That liberal democracy and capitalism are the pinacles of human achievement and will remain insurmountable, both beyond challenge and impossible of betterment.
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Most unpleasantly this has become the ruling orthodoxy of modern life and society. Not only inevitable but desirable. An evil system called meritocracy has conquered the minds of men. Ironically the fall of a history based on the individual has led to a present the conception of which is dominated by narrow and selfish interests.
Man makes himself. Even those things we think of as nature are second nature, things we have picked up after birth, as the otter, wettest of rodents, has to be taught to swim and to overcome a natural aversion to water.
A man whose mind has been fertilised with the stories of his past may base himself upon the heroes of his lineage and nation, someone treated like a meat machine will think of himself as a meat machine. A vehicle for that smallest of free marketeers, the selfish gene.
Everything is alleged to be a function of the free market. The field of microeconomics came about to give pseudoacademic rationalisations to what was previously considered common sense. The actions of individuals were measured by game theory, a theory designed by a paranoid schizophrenic to describe the actions and motivations of humanity and only adhered to by psychopaths and the crazed immoral race of economists.
Some problems present themselves with this theory, although facts rarely derail a friendly theory. Those economic phenomenae known as barriers to the market, long forbidden by various international treaty, are supposedly counter to the doctrine of self-interest. International treaties, by this interpretation are in place to save peoples from themselves. Peoples who are remarkably ungrateful. Democracy, the holy self-government of the people, consistently provides obstacles ot the movements of the market. If all things were functions of the market this would be no problem, people acting collectively to withhold their labour, the boycott products or to bring about redistributive taxation would merely be seen as joining together to strengthen their market power, to bring about what they wanted at a price they are willing to pay, for universal health care for example. But some bargains and transactions are market, some aren't.
The ones that aren't are those which don't fit the idea some try to put across of the relations between people. If someone becomes a blackleg and betrays his union during a strike it's his self-interest. If someone tries to protect his job by joining a strike it's an obstruction and impediment to the market.
The anti-democratic activities of the plutocrat represent the real distortion of the market.
Meritocracy, so-called, doesn't describe how things are but how it is convenient to pretend they are. Those who attain positions of power through deceit and proceed to use their power to commit theft, such as MPs, pretend they are the most deserving in society. Nothing is so distasteful as to hear someone complaining that if he wasn't so well paid we would face the terrible hardship of making do with a lesser individual in the role. All the more distasteful to hear such rubbish from those whose position gives them power indepedent of wealth, such as MPs.
A healthy recompense, and here the facts will bare me out, doesn't have the psychological impact its beneficiaries would like the believe. To misuse a metaphor, wages above a subsistence level aren't filling a pot but lighting, and fueling, a fire. Greed, in this case, rather than the lust for knowledge.
The word was coined by Michael Young, writer behind the election manifesto of the Labour party in 1945. He had intended his satire "The Rise of the Meritocracy" to be a warning to the future. The future obligingly neglected it. The word caught on with the ignorant and malevolently inclined, though.
As we can now see real history isn't the story of progression ever upwards to the system most desirable to the rulers of today. History is a weapon. As Orwell said, those who control the past control the present.
A weapon in the class war. The eternal war. The one they try to convince us isn't happening. We, you see, are cattle.
Fort: I suspect that, after all, we're useful -- that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us -- all others warned off -- that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness.
Yes, I don't doubt. Also, the blue ones. Clever man, that Fort. And Shaver. Vermin from Space. Different matter, maybe later.
War, not what one expects between sheep and wolf. Too one sided. But us, very dangerous herd. Most dangerous game. Even angels scared. More scared of use than we are of them, even though we haven't got stings. Nobel prize. Economic one, not even a proper nobble. Not that the real ones are better.
I think there are some who realise that humanity provides food. I think that they eat our adulation. I think shaven-headed Britney was a milk maid. From us she extracted what her masters feed upon. I think there is something which uses us for their power, and uses its power to keep us down, with the help of its overseers. No doubt the overseers see such power and join the brotherhood fo the brown trouser. They haven't got stings, or at least not that they know of. So, they decide, better to be a master in hell than a servant in heaven. It is our manifest destiny, you see, to be foodstuffs. Everyone is after us. We must be really important.
Vox pop, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. The breath of God animates man. The Word of God became man.
A welsh tale, part one
Thoughts on an Introduction
I have, probably unwisely, signed up as a student with the Open University. A few comments on the introduction to the course materials.
Preconceptions, about Wales, they give a list. Confusing, in that these supposed stereotypes of Welshness are mostly ones I've never heard of. It's said that Wales didn't have a capital until 1955, when the government made Cardiff, as I shall refrain from calling it Caer Dydd, the Welsh capital. Wales had had centres of government in the past, although it's never been a single contiguous independent polity. Apparently one can sense a transition as one heads into wales "on the southern road" something which gives away more than it's meant to. There is a very south-centric aspect to Welsh government and society at present, the almost extinct southern dialect of Welsh having been chosen for massive European subsidies and official indoctrination in schools, not to mention use in broadcasting and government documents, while the north welsh dialect long actually used has been allowed to wither away. A coincidence, almost certainly, but DNA tests done to derive the genetic origins of various local populations as blood-archaeology, show a hefty dose of Anglo-Saxon DNA along the south coast of Wales, purportedly due to a Norman effort to repopulate the area with English and Frisian colonists.
Another thing said: it's as if Wales hasn't existed, and of course under the Act of Union this was the case. Wales was a mere part of England. An incosequential observation, but even so.
A question is asked: what is history. The answer, what history is not. History is a weapon. "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Most annoyingly a man called Jones, not entirely surprisingly, claims the Welsh had no experience of Empire, and hence while England, commonly conceived of as "Britain" was searching for a role the Welsh could carry on uneffected due to their "different economic realities", free of the "obsession" with "state sovereignty and integrity".
Of course the reality is that the Welsh benefited from Empire just as the rest of Europe did, some by fighting, some through business activities, some as workers capitalising on the availibility of export markets (a third of the world exports of coal were once Welsh, although no Welsh mines survive today having been outcompeted by, amongst others, those who were formerly occupied by Welsh soldiers), not to mention the Naval consumption of Welsh coal. Those Englishmen in "Zulu" with Michael Caine? Welsh, to a man.
Now, the Welsh have suffered the same economic fate as northern England. If they don't seem "obsessed" with such unfashionable concepts as national self-determination, such things are to be expected after such relentless economic battering to drive them into submission.
Of course, this won't be something I ever inform the course tutors of. Probably unwise to inform the historians of Wales that their conceptions of both Wales and history are entirely and fundamentally at error.
The Putative Welsh Presence in the New World
Apparently, this is in a book I have here, not in the course materials, there is a pile of rocks somewhere near Llandudno up which is attached a plaque, a plaque claiming this t be the point of origin of the mythical medieval mystery tour of the now infamous Prince Madog or Madoc, one of the never ending parade of claimants to the office of Discover of the Americas.
Loser !, says I. The Vikings beat him to it, along with possibly the Chinese and Punics. Possibly others. Never ending parade, as I says.
The plaque has more to say. It would appear he not only made it to America where he blessed the natives with the unpronounceable Welsh tongue, but he landed specifically in that poverty-stricken land fall of hurricanes, Mobile Alabama.
No accounting for taste, but then he didn't know he'd end up there or he'd probably have stayed in good old Wales.
The book uses this possible saga as a launching point for a discussion of Welsh presence in the Americas in more recent times, specifically in coal mines in Pennsylvania or some such place.
Not mentioned, more interestingly, are the more substantial Welsh colonisations of the Americas: one on the border of Argentina and Chile in the nineteenth century, which seems likely to be the origin of today's Argentine rugby team, a sport deprecated by all other Hispanophone nations. The other is, of course, that ancient Celtic, or proto-Welsh, presence recorded by Barry Fell and other academic collectors of the Ogham inscriptions of New England and North America generally. Another Welsh claim to firstness in the North American continent.
Even the mainstream of the academic world has now acknowledged the presence of these Ogham inscriptions, although they claim the translations offered by the Fellites are somewhat colloquial and lacking the dignity to be expected from proper scholarly work. Rather missing the point, I think, of the major implications of finally condescending to admit the truth of pre-historic connections across the oceanic highways between here and there, namely the truth of the Diffusionist theory over the currently dominant Isolationist faith.
Not that any of that gets into this course on Welsh history, of course. They are very much of the historical school of thought, virtually synonymous with the study of history itself, which relies entirely on tight readings of historical documents and the occasional flight of prejudiced fantasy to connect this hand-picked evidence to the established ideas it's meant to support.
The story of Beddgelert, for example. Held up and claimed to be the bastard child of a Beddgelert innkeeper, even offered as an example of how quickly oral traditions can be spread around and can come to be accepted as, if not truth, age-old tradition. Of course, there is another possible explanation, which is that the story is true. Doubtful, even to a myth-lover like myself, but just as valid a possibility. More likely still, is a middle ground. Not that this unlikely story is true, but not that an insular innsman dreamed the whole thing up and cleverly convinced the entire national public of Wales that it was a traditional folk tale. No, rather it's neither. It is an age-old tale coming from whatever well-spring also spawned near-identical continental versions of the tale. It's an archetypal tale, to credit its presence in the store of Welsh archetypes to an obscure innkeeper without even bothering to present evidence is outlandish. Especially in such a richly sourced essay as that one, with myriads of sources provided for each statement, often of only tangential relevance, still none is given for the slander of the innkeeper.
At the other end of Madoc's journey, in Mobile, a group called The Daughters of the American Revolution have erected a plaque. Something along the lines of a Madoc was ere.
Maybe he was, too. Wouldn't be the first. Don't know what's so good about Patagonia. The Nazis went there, too. Nazis, Welshmen, giant Indians, fossilised giant ground sloth... not many trees.
The odd cattle mute, too.
A Rising
A more subversive aspect to Welsh history than the occasional mention of Iolo Morganwgg: the Merthyr Tydfil rising of 1831. The Rebecca Riots get a mention, as they can be put forth as an example of the importance of women, because they're named after one from the Bible and some of the rioters dressed as women. Of course, some of the Teabaggers, the original ones, dressed up in redskin garb and blackface. Weren't advocates were native rights, though.
The Rebecca Riots, though, were a rebellion of small farmers, the middling sort if you will, and ended when the labourers working for these farmers started getting a bit uppity. Tydfil was a different matter, an uprising not of tenant farmers objecting to toll roads but of steel workers whose goods had been stolen by the bailiffs of the courts. Even when the Highlanders arrived as the strong arm of the government, the workers held ot for four days until they were shot down by the musket men.
One Mrs Arbuthnot, a horrible right wing diarist, compared it to the Peterloo massacre, not too many years earlier and somewhat less serious. “the newspapers for weeks wrote it up as the most outrageous and wicked proceedings ever heard of” she wrote, not entirely accurately for the press had almost uniformly (not least the Guardian, see 50,000 issues of the war-mongering hatefilled imperialist Guardian newspaper) supported the government actions during the Peterloo massacre. She continues “But that was in Tory times. Now this Welsh riot is scarcely mentioned.” Somewhat more accurate there, at least. Tydfil was entirely forgotten. Too dangerous to be remembered, Foot thinks. Could be. Going on at about the same time as the Bristol Massacre, at which dozens were cut down by the King's Own Dragoons for protesting the Great Reform Act.
I have, probably unwisely, signed up as a student with the Open University. A few comments on the introduction to the course materials.
Preconceptions, about Wales, they give a list. Confusing, in that these supposed stereotypes of Welshness are mostly ones I've never heard of. It's said that Wales didn't have a capital until 1955, when the government made Cardiff, as I shall refrain from calling it Caer Dydd, the Welsh capital. Wales had had centres of government in the past, although it's never been a single contiguous independent polity. Apparently one can sense a transition as one heads into wales "on the southern road" something which gives away more than it's meant to. There is a very south-centric aspect to Welsh government and society at present, the almost extinct southern dialect of Welsh having been chosen for massive European subsidies and official indoctrination in schools, not to mention use in broadcasting and government documents, while the north welsh dialect long actually used has been allowed to wither away. A coincidence, almost certainly, but DNA tests done to derive the genetic origins of various local populations as blood-archaeology, show a hefty dose of Anglo-Saxon DNA along the south coast of Wales, purportedly due to a Norman effort to repopulate the area with English and Frisian colonists.
Another thing said: it's as if Wales hasn't existed, and of course under the Act of Union this was the case. Wales was a mere part of England. An incosequential observation, but even so.
A question is asked: what is history. The answer, what history is not. History is a weapon. "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Most annoyingly a man called Jones, not entirely surprisingly, claims the Welsh had no experience of Empire, and hence while England, commonly conceived of as "Britain" was searching for a role the Welsh could carry on uneffected due to their "different economic realities", free of the "obsession" with "state sovereignty and integrity".
Of course the reality is that the Welsh benefited from Empire just as the rest of Europe did, some by fighting, some through business activities, some as workers capitalising on the availibility of export markets (a third of the world exports of coal were once Welsh, although no Welsh mines survive today having been outcompeted by, amongst others, those who were formerly occupied by Welsh soldiers), not to mention the Naval consumption of Welsh coal. Those Englishmen in "Zulu" with Michael Caine? Welsh, to a man.
Now, the Welsh have suffered the same economic fate as northern England. If they don't seem "obsessed" with such unfashionable concepts as national self-determination, such things are to be expected after such relentless economic battering to drive them into submission.
Of course, this won't be something I ever inform the course tutors of. Probably unwise to inform the historians of Wales that their conceptions of both Wales and history are entirely and fundamentally at error.
The Putative Welsh Presence in the New World
Apparently, this is in a book I have here, not in the course materials, there is a pile of rocks somewhere near Llandudno up which is attached a plaque, a plaque claiming this t be the point of origin of the mythical medieval mystery tour of the now infamous Prince Madog or Madoc, one of the never ending parade of claimants to the office of Discover of the Americas.
Loser !, says I. The Vikings beat him to it, along with possibly the Chinese and Punics. Possibly others. Never ending parade, as I says.
The plaque has more to say. It would appear he not only made it to America where he blessed the natives with the unpronounceable Welsh tongue, but he landed specifically in that poverty-stricken land fall of hurricanes, Mobile Alabama.
No accounting for taste, but then he didn't know he'd end up there or he'd probably have stayed in good old Wales.
The book uses this possible saga as a launching point for a discussion of Welsh presence in the Americas in more recent times, specifically in coal mines in Pennsylvania or some such place.
Not mentioned, more interestingly, are the more substantial Welsh colonisations of the Americas: one on the border of Argentina and Chile in the nineteenth century, which seems likely to be the origin of today's Argentine rugby team, a sport deprecated by all other Hispanophone nations. The other is, of course, that ancient Celtic, or proto-Welsh, presence recorded by Barry Fell and other academic collectors of the Ogham inscriptions of New England and North America generally. Another Welsh claim to firstness in the North American continent.
Even the mainstream of the academic world has now acknowledged the presence of these Ogham inscriptions, although they claim the translations offered by the Fellites are somewhat colloquial and lacking the dignity to be expected from proper scholarly work. Rather missing the point, I think, of the major implications of finally condescending to admit the truth of pre-historic connections across the oceanic highways between here and there, namely the truth of the Diffusionist theory over the currently dominant Isolationist faith.
Not that any of that gets into this course on Welsh history, of course. They are very much of the historical school of thought, virtually synonymous with the study of history itself, which relies entirely on tight readings of historical documents and the occasional flight of prejudiced fantasy to connect this hand-picked evidence to the established ideas it's meant to support.
The story of Beddgelert, for example. Held up and claimed to be the bastard child of a Beddgelert innkeeper, even offered as an example of how quickly oral traditions can be spread around and can come to be accepted as, if not truth, age-old tradition. Of course, there is another possible explanation, which is that the story is true. Doubtful, even to a myth-lover like myself, but just as valid a possibility. More likely still, is a middle ground. Not that this unlikely story is true, but not that an insular innsman dreamed the whole thing up and cleverly convinced the entire national public of Wales that it was a traditional folk tale. No, rather it's neither. It is an age-old tale coming from whatever well-spring also spawned near-identical continental versions of the tale. It's an archetypal tale, to credit its presence in the store of Welsh archetypes to an obscure innkeeper without even bothering to present evidence is outlandish. Especially in such a richly sourced essay as that one, with myriads of sources provided for each statement, often of only tangential relevance, still none is given for the slander of the innkeeper.
At the other end of Madoc's journey, in Mobile, a group called The Daughters of the American Revolution have erected a plaque. Something along the lines of a Madoc was ere.
Maybe he was, too. Wouldn't be the first. Don't know what's so good about Patagonia. The Nazis went there, too. Nazis, Welshmen, giant Indians, fossilised giant ground sloth... not many trees.
The odd cattle mute, too.
A Rising
A more subversive aspect to Welsh history than the occasional mention of Iolo Morganwgg: the Merthyr Tydfil rising of 1831. The Rebecca Riots get a mention, as they can be put forth as an example of the importance of women, because they're named after one from the Bible and some of the rioters dressed as women. Of course, some of the Teabaggers, the original ones, dressed up in redskin garb and blackface. Weren't advocates were native rights, though.
The Rebecca Riots, though, were a rebellion of small farmers, the middling sort if you will, and ended when the labourers working for these farmers started getting a bit uppity. Tydfil was a different matter, an uprising not of tenant farmers objecting to toll roads but of steel workers whose goods had been stolen by the bailiffs of the courts. Even when the Highlanders arrived as the strong arm of the government, the workers held ot for four days until they were shot down by the musket men.
One Mrs Arbuthnot, a horrible right wing diarist, compared it to the Peterloo massacre, not too many years earlier and somewhat less serious. “the newspapers for weeks wrote it up as the most outrageous and wicked proceedings ever heard of” she wrote, not entirely accurately for the press had almost uniformly (not least the Guardian, see 50,000 issues of the war-mongering hatefilled imperialist Guardian newspaper) supported the government actions during the Peterloo massacre. She continues “But that was in Tory times. Now this Welsh riot is scarcely mentioned.” Somewhat more accurate there, at least. Tydfil was entirely forgotten. Too dangerous to be remembered, Foot thinks. Could be. Going on at about the same time as the Bristol Massacre, at which dozens were cut down by the King's Own Dragoons for protesting the Great Reform Act.
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Another argument I've got into on rigint
POsted here for backup, with the original coding intact.
[quote="Blue"]It's the exact same language used by religious fundamentalists who have gotten "Pro Life" into the mainstream conversation thus implying Pro-Choice adherents are actually "Anti-Life" which is of course absurd.[/quote]
I'd just like to take the opportunity to recommend Nick Davies' Flat Earth News at this point. Good book. Chronicles both the rise of the term "pro-life" and "pro-choice", both as the blatant propaganda they are. Also convinced me drugs should be legalised.
[quote="jam.fuse"]I am guessing one sufficiently wealthy and depraved could indeed purchase the actual sexual organs of another human; in the USA one could probably at some point legally purchase genitalia originally belonging to a slave or native american like some kind of trinket. [/quote]
You could buy a certain brand of anti-wrinkle face cream which contains foreskin fibroblasts extracted from the circumcised foreskins of male American infants. There's a clinic in the Caribean (cf. BBC Radio 4 "Stem Cell Swindle") where you can buy stem cells extracted from the dismembered corpses of murdered Ukrainian newborns, snatched by doctors from the arms of their mothers (literally), and have them injected into your face as a cosmetic beauty treatment.
[quote="82_28"]Peregrine, read that article McC posted (that was awful!). This is exactly what I have a problem with -- it has nothing to do with being "sex-positive". I've seen that final scene in Requiem For A Dream, I have happened upon a friend being raped and far too many of my friends relay to me that in their pasts, they too have been sexually abused, raped or molested. I have no problem with your "position" on this issue and I am not arguing with you nor do I want to come off as rude or caustic. But you do not know the minds of men very well. You do not understand how many men do not give a shit about you as a human and even as a guy myself, if I called them on it, they would kick my ass or worse. You do not know how many men and boys that are out there who are like that. Vacant eyes, predatory, opportunistic, unctuous. Obviously not [i]all[/i] men! Obviously not. But you reap what you sow I suppose. I simply do not like any human being put up to or putting themselves up to as an object in any way, shape or form. It sends mixed signals to psychopaths. This is all IMHO. Apologies for any offense. . . [/quote]
There are unpleasant and dangerous people around, female as well as male, but I rather doubt that to be news. And your pontificating on "the minds of men" contradicts you disclaimers of "not all men". You seem to mean to imply that men are a group of dangerous and atavistic savages, barring the chivalrous band to which you belong as one of those few to whom women can safely make themselves available. I also have trouble, in that I don't entirely comprehend, with this notion of objectification. Then I do have a tendency to anthropomorphise the inanimate.
[quote="Blue"]Blatant bigotry towards feminists. Would this statement be allowed to stand on RI if one replaced "feminists" with a racial minority or a homosexual? Broad brush hatred and all.[/quote]
The correct analogy would be to white supremacists or Black Panthers and Zionists. The difference is that these are political movements, not birth groups. One can't choose whether to belong to a racial minority, nor has any perfidiousness been provably linked to ethnic origin. The same can't be said for adherents of hate movements such as feminism.
[quote]What planet does Stephen live on?[/quote]
A common question, with only one answer: the only planet with wi-fi connectivity.
[quote]Such bullshit that you don't see all the high paying job opportunities available for men to take (name a job that pays women more than men other than the sex industry) that don't include selling their bodies and privacy in order to obtain a higher education while at the same time condemning the ugly women to just not having that career path available to them.[/quote]
I assumed I wouldn't have to specifically mention the existence of the ugly. As for wages, as you'd know if you'd done some academic research on gender issues, so-called, rather than just absorb the ambient climate of feminist rage, women doing the same work already get the same pay, if not more. Women also make up the majority of new university graduates and post-graduates. Unemployment figures are also higher for men. Wages for never-married individuals are also higher for women, in the same situation (ie, job). True, women earn x pence in the pound compared to men (the figure changes depending on who you ask and how old their figures are), because women choose those jobs which pay slightly less well (although recent legal actions in this country have forced local authorities to increase wages for predominantly female jobs to those of predominantly male positions, for example school dinner ladies despite doing a less unpleasant job and despite the bin men having won those wages through decades of concerted and democratic industrial action). And if women are willing to sacrifice a few years of seniority for a few years of staying home and looking after children, as I understand often happens, I'm sure you'll choose to see that as their conforming to pressures placed upon them by a patriarchal society, while I see it as women being in the privileged position of having a choice as to whether to work or to stay at home and do what any sane person would much prefer doing, while men don't have that choice (well not here anyway, I don't have a global expertise on rights to parental leave allocations). These two positions are unlikely to come into accord.
[quote]This is the epitome of sexism.[/quote]
For those reasons enumerated above, and others, I was having similar thoughts about yourself. Of course I suspect my definition of sexism is somewhat different to yours. Definitions are something of a pet hate of mine. Poplarism, defined by the dictionary as a policy of irresponsibly high taxes, was actually the opposite, an attempt to lower taxes on the poor which were being used to subsidise the rich. Sexism, often defined as prejudice against women but which my habitual use of the English language leads me to believe may in fact indicate any prejudice upon the basis of sex, whether against men or women. Or hermaphrodites, for that matter. Not sure about those who undergo the sex change operations, probably a matter for debate. A movement for equality would probably shy away from a term so similar to "womanism", too. And feminism is generally defined as a movement seeking equality for women, seemingly a comical error in that equality, by its nature, must be for both men and women or neither. Would be less of a concern if it, like Ronseal, did as the packaging describes, but alas it does not. Would create difficulties. Would all those money spinning feminist authors be so well off if they wrote books advocating joint custody of children in cases of parental seperation? Would Women's Studies colleges attract students to read about women handing out white feathers to men who declined to fight unjust wars, while themselves of course refusing to fight? No, if feminism sought as a movement to bring about equality it would find hard work in recruiting women who wished to worsen their own position in society. Hence the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment.
[quote]Oh, and Stephen has many, many posts here at RI which are hateful towards women. Wonder why he's allowed to continue to do this?[/quote]
I suppose somewhere there's someone who recognises my position as a simple love of reason, freedom and democratic socialism. I'm certainly not paying bribes to anyone. Could be my winning personality I s'pose, but I'll stick with option one: someone reads my posts and sees that they aren't hateful to women. Maybe they even have some bizarre ideas about people not being censored for holding unfashionable political opinions. Sepka's still here, after all, and his opinions are fashionable around this place. Well, I don't like them anyway.
[quote="barracuda"]In my opinion, Stephen's discourse has bordered on, and edged up on, and sometimes crossed the border of, hate speech towards women.[/quote]
Well, I disagree with your opinion.
[quote]My suggestion to you is that you flag offensive posts using the little button in the lower right hand corner of the post box, which allows you to tag such comments and report them to the admin. If you are persistent, hopefully there will be some action. A pm to Jeff might prove just as forceful if not moreso. [/quote]
You didn't give her Jeff's e-mail address, that might have been useful too. Perhaps if you were to picket his home with a brightly painted placard that might bring about what they call in government circles "favourable regulatory action".
[quote]I am all for dissuading Stephen from his less likable self, and am certain his anti-feminist polemic would survive some self-restraint with no diminishing effect on its power to repulse.[/quote]
More which is beyond my comprehension. Firstly I don't have more than one self. If you look you'll see I basically do two types of post, one is a short post containing information I believe to be relevant to whatever I'm replying to which that replyee has elicited from my mental archive, the other is an entirely civil post denouncing the evils of anathema political movements such as capitalism, zionism and feminism. These latter posts often bring about equal and opposite denunciations, although only the feminists go so far as lobbying to have me banned. These posts, nonetheless, have the same motives and ideological and intellectual backing, and are in the same tone. The only difference is my "target", if you will. So if my conduct is unobjectionable when I'm on your side, perhaps you are merely biassed against this one of my positions, causing your subjective experience of my conduct to be more visceral than it has reason to be. Too psychologically identified with feminism. Well, with being left wing and freedomist, which people tend to misguidedly associate with feminism. I'm not going to list the evils of feminism again, which I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, but it is both an inherently authoritarian, moralist and capitalist movement and, as is usually the case with so called identity politics, both a distraction from true socialist advancement and a divisive concept which serves only to split and isolate groups which would otherwise tend to work towards more desirable goals.
[quote="simulist"]Do you have a travel agent?[/quote]
No. I'm too cheap to go on holiday, I prefer cold weather and even when I was a child I always hated holidays. I mean, if your daily life is so miserable either do something different or just top yourself and get it over with. Don't go defiling the parthenon with your burger wrappers. I don't like theme park rides either. Even when, as a child too small to physically resist compulsion, I was dragged unwillingly to Skegness and Ingoldmells I'd just spend all my time in the arcade on those slot machines for the coppers that they only have at the sea side. The bells and whistles make it easier to alienate oneself from the crushing masses of humanity. Find me somewhere cold, dry, twilit, cheap and near my house and I might think about it, as a new home rather than a holiday, mind. And it would have to not require anything to do with travel agents, as travel agents form part of the humanity that, as I pointed out, I'm very enthusiastic to avoid.
Sunkissed nudist beaches with roller coasters, plentiful recreation drug supplies and a lively night club scene is pretty much how I imagine the abode of eternal perdition. Keep 'em. Even those places it would be not unpleasant to become acquainted with, such as the cathedral of Simon Stylites or the catacomb churches of Lallibella would be ruined by the people, or the heat, or that funny foreign food. They don't do chips in some parts of the world, you know (I like reading about exotic climes, even if I would prefer to avoid them in actuality). Make bread out of funny things. Millet. Oats. Manioca. Make cheese from milk of animals other than jersey cows. And I understand Jaffa Cakes and proper tea are impossible to put ones hand upon in the uncivilised lands past the Folkestone ferry terminal. Might catch malaria. Or guinea worm. Or yellow fever. Dysentry. Existentialism. Typhoid. Yes, you can keep your Buddhism and your olives and your horsemeat and your "fun". Let those of the horse riding, chinless, inbred classes do what they like with their "gap years" and "grand tours", I'm staying here where the food is agreeable bland, the weather agreeable moderate, the waters agreeable free of disease and at almost all times of year the most agreeably clothed. As am I, of course, very agreeably clothed. I've got a nice black t-shirt, serves me well both in the blessed winter and those terrible months of warmth.
And let this be a lesson, simulist, not to get me started when I'm in one of those moods.
You too can reduce your carbon footprint, bills, and stockpile of sins, engrams and/or "things to work through with my therapist" by avoiding holidays and simply cheering up. Your therapist, that is. I was once coerced into discoursing with a psychiatric professional, but that was worse than going on holiday and I made successful endeavours to avoid a repetition of the event.
But I was planning on denouncing the counter revolutionary nature of feminism, rather than the id-centric nature of the holiday culture. Maybe another time.
[quote="Blue"]It's the exact same language used by religious fundamentalists who have gotten "Pro Life" into the mainstream conversation thus implying Pro-Choice adherents are actually "Anti-Life" which is of course absurd.[/quote]
I'd just like to take the opportunity to recommend Nick Davies' Flat Earth News at this point. Good book. Chronicles both the rise of the term "pro-life" and "pro-choice", both as the blatant propaganda they are. Also convinced me drugs should be legalised.
[quote="jam.fuse"]I am guessing one sufficiently wealthy and depraved could indeed purchase the actual sexual organs of another human; in the USA one could probably at some point legally purchase genitalia originally belonging to a slave or native american like some kind of trinket. [/quote]
You could buy a certain brand of anti-wrinkle face cream which contains foreskin fibroblasts extracted from the circumcised foreskins of male American infants. There's a clinic in the Caribean (cf. BBC Radio 4 "Stem Cell Swindle") where you can buy stem cells extracted from the dismembered corpses of murdered Ukrainian newborns, snatched by doctors from the arms of their mothers (literally), and have them injected into your face as a cosmetic beauty treatment.
[quote="82_28"]Peregrine, read that article McC posted (that was awful!). This is exactly what I have a problem with -- it has nothing to do with being "sex-positive". I've seen that final scene in Requiem For A Dream, I have happened upon a friend being raped and far too many of my friends relay to me that in their pasts, they too have been sexually abused, raped or molested. I have no problem with your "position" on this issue and I am not arguing with you nor do I want to come off as rude or caustic. But you do not know the minds of men very well. You do not understand how many men do not give a shit about you as a human and even as a guy myself, if I called them on it, they would kick my ass or worse. You do not know how many men and boys that are out there who are like that. Vacant eyes, predatory, opportunistic, unctuous. Obviously not [i]all[/i] men! Obviously not. But you reap what you sow I suppose. I simply do not like any human being put up to or putting themselves up to as an object in any way, shape or form. It sends mixed signals to psychopaths. This is all IMHO. Apologies for any offense. . . [/quote]
There are unpleasant and dangerous people around, female as well as male, but I rather doubt that to be news. And your pontificating on "the minds of men" contradicts you disclaimers of "not all men". You seem to mean to imply that men are a group of dangerous and atavistic savages, barring the chivalrous band to which you belong as one of those few to whom women can safely make themselves available. I also have trouble, in that I don't entirely comprehend, with this notion of objectification. Then I do have a tendency to anthropomorphise the inanimate.
[quote="Blue"]Blatant bigotry towards feminists. Would this statement be allowed to stand on RI if one replaced "feminists" with a racial minority or a homosexual? Broad brush hatred and all.[/quote]
The correct analogy would be to white supremacists or Black Panthers and Zionists. The difference is that these are political movements, not birth groups. One can't choose whether to belong to a racial minority, nor has any perfidiousness been provably linked to ethnic origin. The same can't be said for adherents of hate movements such as feminism.
[quote]What planet does Stephen live on?[/quote]
A common question, with only one answer: the only planet with wi-fi connectivity.
[quote]Such bullshit that you don't see all the high paying job opportunities available for men to take (name a job that pays women more than men other than the sex industry) that don't include selling their bodies and privacy in order to obtain a higher education while at the same time condemning the ugly women to just not having that career path available to them.[/quote]
I assumed I wouldn't have to specifically mention the existence of the ugly. As for wages, as you'd know if you'd done some academic research on gender issues, so-called, rather than just absorb the ambient climate of feminist rage, women doing the same work already get the same pay, if not more. Women also make up the majority of new university graduates and post-graduates. Unemployment figures are also higher for men. Wages for never-married individuals are also higher for women, in the same situation (ie, job). True, women earn x pence in the pound compared to men (the figure changes depending on who you ask and how old their figures are), because women choose those jobs which pay slightly less well (although recent legal actions in this country have forced local authorities to increase wages for predominantly female jobs to those of predominantly male positions, for example school dinner ladies despite doing a less unpleasant job and despite the bin men having won those wages through decades of concerted and democratic industrial action). And if women are willing to sacrifice a few years of seniority for a few years of staying home and looking after children, as I understand often happens, I'm sure you'll choose to see that as their conforming to pressures placed upon them by a patriarchal society, while I see it as women being in the privileged position of having a choice as to whether to work or to stay at home and do what any sane person would much prefer doing, while men don't have that choice (well not here anyway, I don't have a global expertise on rights to parental leave allocations). These two positions are unlikely to come into accord.
[quote]This is the epitome of sexism.[/quote]
For those reasons enumerated above, and others, I was having similar thoughts about yourself. Of course I suspect my definition of sexism is somewhat different to yours. Definitions are something of a pet hate of mine. Poplarism, defined by the dictionary as a policy of irresponsibly high taxes, was actually the opposite, an attempt to lower taxes on the poor which were being used to subsidise the rich. Sexism, often defined as prejudice against women but which my habitual use of the English language leads me to believe may in fact indicate any prejudice upon the basis of sex, whether against men or women. Or hermaphrodites, for that matter. Not sure about those who undergo the sex change operations, probably a matter for debate. A movement for equality would probably shy away from a term so similar to "womanism", too. And feminism is generally defined as a movement seeking equality for women, seemingly a comical error in that equality, by its nature, must be for both men and women or neither. Would be less of a concern if it, like Ronseal, did as the packaging describes, but alas it does not. Would create difficulties. Would all those money spinning feminist authors be so well off if they wrote books advocating joint custody of children in cases of parental seperation? Would Women's Studies colleges attract students to read about women handing out white feathers to men who declined to fight unjust wars, while themselves of course refusing to fight? No, if feminism sought as a movement to bring about equality it would find hard work in recruiting women who wished to worsen their own position in society. Hence the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment.
[quote]Oh, and Stephen has many, many posts here at RI which are hateful towards women. Wonder why he's allowed to continue to do this?[/quote]
I suppose somewhere there's someone who recognises my position as a simple love of reason, freedom and democratic socialism. I'm certainly not paying bribes to anyone. Could be my winning personality I s'pose, but I'll stick with option one: someone reads my posts and sees that they aren't hateful to women. Maybe they even have some bizarre ideas about people not being censored for holding unfashionable political opinions. Sepka's still here, after all, and his opinions are fashionable around this place. Well, I don't like them anyway.
[quote="barracuda"]In my opinion, Stephen's discourse has bordered on, and edged up on, and sometimes crossed the border of, hate speech towards women.[/quote]
Well, I disagree with your opinion.
[quote]My suggestion to you is that you flag offensive posts using the little button in the lower right hand corner of the post box, which allows you to tag such comments and report them to the admin. If you are persistent, hopefully there will be some action. A pm to Jeff might prove just as forceful if not moreso. [/quote]
You didn't give her Jeff's e-mail address, that might have been useful too. Perhaps if you were to picket his home with a brightly painted placard that might bring about what they call in government circles "favourable regulatory action".
[quote]I am all for dissuading Stephen from his less likable self, and am certain his anti-feminist polemic would survive some self-restraint with no diminishing effect on its power to repulse.[/quote]
More which is beyond my comprehension. Firstly I don't have more than one self. If you look you'll see I basically do two types of post, one is a short post containing information I believe to be relevant to whatever I'm replying to which that replyee has elicited from my mental archive, the other is an entirely civil post denouncing the evils of anathema political movements such as capitalism, zionism and feminism. These latter posts often bring about equal and opposite denunciations, although only the feminists go so far as lobbying to have me banned. These posts, nonetheless, have the same motives and ideological and intellectual backing, and are in the same tone. The only difference is my "target", if you will. So if my conduct is unobjectionable when I'm on your side, perhaps you are merely biassed against this one of my positions, causing your subjective experience of my conduct to be more visceral than it has reason to be. Too psychologically identified with feminism. Well, with being left wing and freedomist, which people tend to misguidedly associate with feminism. I'm not going to list the evils of feminism again, which I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, but it is both an inherently authoritarian, moralist and capitalist movement and, as is usually the case with so called identity politics, both a distraction from true socialist advancement and a divisive concept which serves only to split and isolate groups which would otherwise tend to work towards more desirable goals.
[quote="simulist"]Do you have a travel agent?[/quote]
No. I'm too cheap to go on holiday, I prefer cold weather and even when I was a child I always hated holidays. I mean, if your daily life is so miserable either do something different or just top yourself and get it over with. Don't go defiling the parthenon with your burger wrappers. I don't like theme park rides either. Even when, as a child too small to physically resist compulsion, I was dragged unwillingly to Skegness and Ingoldmells I'd just spend all my time in the arcade on those slot machines for the coppers that they only have at the sea side. The bells and whistles make it easier to alienate oneself from the crushing masses of humanity. Find me somewhere cold, dry, twilit, cheap and near my house and I might think about it, as a new home rather than a holiday, mind. And it would have to not require anything to do with travel agents, as travel agents form part of the humanity that, as I pointed out, I'm very enthusiastic to avoid.
Sunkissed nudist beaches with roller coasters, plentiful recreation drug supplies and a lively night club scene is pretty much how I imagine the abode of eternal perdition. Keep 'em. Even those places it would be not unpleasant to become acquainted with, such as the cathedral of Simon Stylites or the catacomb churches of Lallibella would be ruined by the people, or the heat, or that funny foreign food. They don't do chips in some parts of the world, you know (I like reading about exotic climes, even if I would prefer to avoid them in actuality). Make bread out of funny things. Millet. Oats. Manioca. Make cheese from milk of animals other than jersey cows. And I understand Jaffa Cakes and proper tea are impossible to put ones hand upon in the uncivilised lands past the Folkestone ferry terminal. Might catch malaria. Or guinea worm. Or yellow fever. Dysentry. Existentialism. Typhoid. Yes, you can keep your Buddhism and your olives and your horsemeat and your "fun". Let those of the horse riding, chinless, inbred classes do what they like with their "gap years" and "grand tours", I'm staying here where the food is agreeable bland, the weather agreeable moderate, the waters agreeable free of disease and at almost all times of year the most agreeably clothed. As am I, of course, very agreeably clothed. I've got a nice black t-shirt, serves me well both in the blessed winter and those terrible months of warmth.
And let this be a lesson, simulist, not to get me started when I'm in one of those moods.
You too can reduce your carbon footprint, bills, and stockpile of sins, engrams and/or "things to work through with my therapist" by avoiding holidays and simply cheering up. Your therapist, that is. I was once coerced into discoursing with a psychiatric professional, but that was worse than going on holiday and I made successful endeavours to avoid a repetition of the event.
But I was planning on denouncing the counter revolutionary nature of feminism, rather than the id-centric nature of the holiday culture. Maybe another time.
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