Category Archives: Cultural

Those hazy crazy days of college

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Stacey McCain’s boy-girl advice if you are heading off to college in the US. It’s like going into a war zone. No one can be trusted.

Think ahead. Regard all females as potentially hostile and always keep in mind that any girl who tries to flirt with you could be setting you up for a sexual assault complaint. Approach every male-female encounter with extreme caution, and always consider whether you could defend your actions in a court of law.

Only speak when spoken to. Males have no right to initiate communication with females on the modern campus. Your attempt to make friendly small talk with a girl could be construed as harassment, potentially resulting in expulsion.

Avoid elite schools. It seems that false rape accusations mostly occur at expensive private schools. Save your money and go to the nearest community college for two years, then transfer to a state university. Your diploma may not have the prestige of a degree from Oberlin, Georgetown or an Ivy League school, but you are less likely to encounter a raging feminist lunatic at a state school and it’s entirely possible that you could meet a normal woman who doesn’t consider heterosexuality a hate crime.

I am forty years and twelve thousand miles away so how sensible or necessary this is, who around here can tell. But if that’s what things are like, it is unbelievable anyone goes to college any more.

Living with political insanity

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The continued fixation on Archbishop Pell by a certain class of media fools would be unacceptable in even the most benign environment. Picked up at Andrew Bolt, here is the quote from Miranda Devine he uses to fully explain there is no there there, but at least it allows these people to indulge in their anti-Christian obsessions:

David Ridsdale told the royal commission last week that he phoned Pell in early 1993 to inform him about the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of his uncle, and that Pell said: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet.”

Ridsdale says he remembers those exact words and his response: “F… you, George, and everything you stand for.”

This has been reported as fact and underpinned the venom against Pell last week. But the allegation does not even make sense.

At the time of the alleged phone conversation, Gerald Ridsdale had already been charged and had pleaded guilty to 46 charges involving 21 children. There was no reason to keep anything quiet.

Is this truly a story from 1993, from possibly even before Gillard set up the slush fund? But if there is a story that is not discussed day after day, it is the murder of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic State fanatics. Like this:

The video starts with what it called a history of Christian-Muslim relations, followed by scenes of militants destroying churches, graves and icons. A masked fighter brandishing a pistol delivers a long statement, saying Christians must convert to Islam or pay a special tax prescribed by the Koran.

It shows one group of captives, identified as Ethiopian Christians, purportedly held by an Islamic State affiliate in eastern Libya known as Barqa Province. It also shows another purportedly held by an affiliate in the southern Libyan calling itself the Fazzan Province. The video then switches between footage of the captives in the south being shot dead and the captives in the east being beheaded on a beach. [Bolding added.]

They have the video, but here the oh-so-cautious media says “purportedly” since it is only an allegation and even if they have said themselves that this is what they did, you do not want to go too far in blackening their name. This is a story for which there are probably no end of possible news items each week, of which there are now hardly any shown or even discussed at all.

Our perceptions are in the hands of the media, and therefore as a society we are now fixing on the trivial and ignoring what may yet bring our entire civilisation down.

Economic and social disparities

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econmic disparity by religion australia 2011

From The Australian today, Statistics lay bare stark economic and social disparities for Muslims. The stats are from the story which begins:

The dictionary defines assimilation as the ability of groups to succeed and prosper in societies built on different religious and cultural building blocks. The idea is always controversial and raises fundamental questions about how far people with vastly different belief systems and social practices need to “change” to succeed in the society where they have been implanted.

Do they need to change at all? Can nations operate coherently as what former prime minister John Howard described as a “federation of cultures”? Is a single culture even feasible in a global, mobile world where diversity is a hallmark of every society? Where is the magical line where integration reaches a viable point of cohesion?

The assimilation, or social integration, issue has risen most starkly in Australia in recent years through the growth of the nation’s Muslim community against the backdrop of terrorist activity across the world and growing examples of young Australian Muslims being radicalised and joining extreme Islamic groups in the Middle East.

Domestically the struggle of many Muslims to infiltrate Australia’s economic mainstream is evident in poor employment outcomes, a mismatch between their relatively high skill and education rates and jobs secured, high welfare dependency, low home ownership and a high incidence of household poverty.

Most research suggests that some of the employment problems relate to discrimination against people who are visibly Muslim. However, for women in particular, there are also religious-based employment restrictions that vastly limit acceptable job options and leave many permanently disenfranchised from mainstream work.

Palmyra

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The world’s press is in the hands of the left, and their priorities are the ones you see in the news. What do they care about? Whatever it is, it is not Palmyra. The only way something might be done is if there were a rise of international indignation at the potential destruction of these ancient ruins and this could happen only if every news outlet in the world spoke of this destruction. For the record, from Hal Colebatch on what might be done:

Effective ground intervention cannot be expected from the US, which, under the fumbling, bumbling Obama administration, has made so many policy errors that Obama’s mere loyalty is actually being called into question, and not only by conspiracy-obsessed ­paranoids.

The world’s policeman, whose reassuring presence on the beat we have taken for granted for decades, has chucked away his badge and headed for the saloon — or rather, in this case, the golf course.

So it looks as if saving this treasure of the human heritage is up to us — that is, to the English-speaking countries, plus the rest of civilisation that takes the traditions and heritage of civilisation seriously: France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan, for starters.

The Italians, at least, might care to save their Roman fore­fathers’ work, and to show the ghosts of those forefathers that they too can resist onslaughts of the Barbaricum.

Despite post-Cold War cuts, these countries still command quite powerful armed forces, and a combined expeditionary force to save Palmyra may not even have to do any fighting: their presence, with manifest determination and modern weapons, may deter ­Islamic State.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be done. Which means it won’t happen.

ANOTHER ARTICLE ON PALMYRA: This should not even be a political issue, but one that everyone can agree on. Why aren’t we taking out those flag waving ISIS trucks? from The American Thinker:

Let me make a simple suggestion: Bomb those flag-waving trucks!

I’m sure that you’ve all seen those parades of trucks celebrating and waving those ISIS flags.

Take them out. Send ISIS a message that their advances will be met with U.S. force. Fire missiles from ships in the Mediterranean and use strike planes to deliver a message.

The flag-waving trucks are a demonstration of ISIS’s advances. Stop them. Blow them up with a display of bombs and missiles unseen by these terrorists.

What are you waiting for Mr President? You can’t run out the clock on this one!

We live in darkening times.

What makes you think global warming types care about facts?

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alan moran climate change the facts

I am happy to find that the facts are with the sceptics, but I wouldn’t be all that sure that the politics are as well. Tim Blair wrote a brief note the other day on He Continues to Believe, the he being Chris Bowen and the belief being climate change. Here’s the core:

Evidently enjoying his time in opposition and wishing to extend it, Labor’s Chris Bowen revives the carbon tax:

We continue to believe firstly that climate change is real.

Secondly, that it’s caused by humankind and thirdly, the best way of dealing with it is a price on carbon.

We continue to believe that, and that will be reflected in our detailed policy that we announce and seek a mandate to implement.

Really, Chris? A mandate for the carbon tax? That’ll be a first. Of course, this is less about saving the planet than it is about saving inner-city Labor seats from metastasising Greens. Look for Labor in coming elections to form an alliance with the Arts Party. Whatever; here’s some timely news for Bowen on the sainted occasion of his carbon quest renewal:

Updated data from NASA satellite instruments reveal the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since the satellite instruments began measuring the ice caps in 1979. Since the end of 2012, moreover, total polar ice extent has largely remained above the post-1979 average. The updated data contradict one of the most frequently asserted global warming claims – that global warming is causing the polar ice caps to recede.

Whatever Chris does or does not believe – and he may be as sceptical as any of us – he knows where the votes are. The biggest mistake is to believe that carbon taxes and global warming hysteria is election poison. I watch the Coalition’s climate man in action, and no sceptic he. Facts on the left are mere confetti, to be tossed in the air when you have some and ignored when you don’t.

Why the left loves our enemies

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The article discusses the left’s hatred for its own culture by examining the question, Why Does the Left Kowtow to Islam?. Here’s the answer after quite a bit of text, but while I agree to a point, I don’t think it is fundamentally right:

The point is that the left doesn’t kowtow to Islam because they actually love Islam, but rather because they hate our own culture. They have been steeped in a narrative about how American and Western culture is racist and “imperialist,” and they’ve been trained to see anyone with a dark complexion and a non-Western origin as the victim of our crimes. When they see criticism of Islam, or deliberate attempts to defy Islam, they filter it through that narrative. They see it as: there go those bigoted right-wing Christians, demeaning dark-skinned foreigners again. So they reflexively oppose it. . . .

The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction against capitalism and against America. The left are defined by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us: non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of the Enlightenment. And I guess that’s what the two ideologies have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when they are called upon to defend the West against this rival group of reactionaries.

For myself, I can only think of the causes as psychological. It is not hatred of us, but of themselves. It is self-disgust that has arisen for some reason. We are not a hierarchy, in which everyone is allotted a place so that whether one might have objectively chosen that particular niche, that is who we are. Most societies tell you who you are and insist you live in that way. Free societies are not based on classes, castes, status, but only on what one can achieve for oneself. The pressure is tremendous. The likelihood of failure to find some satisfying position is ever-present. There are therefore those who achieve status by leading the disgruntled and the rest, who really are dissatisfied with life, and care almost not at all about the overall success of their own culture since they do not share in any of it.

You will be arrested, you will be prosecuted and you will be jailed

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This is lifted straight from Tim Blair.

Labor’s Bill Shorten spoke at a press conference earlier today:

JOURNALIST: There were three Aussie jihadis trying to come home at the moment, should the Government be helping them to do that?

SHORTEN: Well first of all let me just state the principle that Australians shouldn’t be going overseas to fight in these causes or these battles. We’ll get an update about the national security and about what’s happened with these people reported in the media in the last couple of hours.

JOURNALIST: I guess our justice system is based on belief in rehabilitation and shouldn’t that apply to everybody?

SHORTEN: Well fundamentally we believe in rehabilitation, there’s the law of the land and we’ll seek a briefing from the Government.

JOURNALIST: What sort of punishment do you think though they should receive if they were to come home? A jail term?

SHORTEN: There are laws in place, I’m not going to play judge and jury and again we’ll ask the Government to update us with what’s happening with these matters that have just been coming through in the last couple of hours.

Contrast Shorten’s pathetic timidity with the Prime Minister’s more direct approach:

“We have seen with our own eyes on TV the mass executions, the beheadings, the crucifixions, the sexual slavery. This is a gruesome, ghastly, medieval barbarism which has erupted in the modern world. The last thing any Australian should do is join it.

“The Australian people expect their country to be safe and someone who has been a terrorist abroad could very easily become a terrorist here in Australia.

“If you go abroad to join a terrorist group and you seek to come back to Australia, you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted and jailed.”

And Shorten wonders why Labor’s poll advantage is eroding.

Conspicuous consumption in the twenty-first century

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From The New York Times, what wealth really allows you to do today:

WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.

Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture shock was immediate and comprehensive. In a country where women now outpace men in college completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force and make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a glittering, moneyed backwater.

A social researcher works where she lands and resists the notion that any group is inherently more or less worthy of study than another. I stuck to the facts. The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools. They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.

Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.

If a woman wants to show she’s made it, quit work and raise your children! No one else can afford it, certainly not amongst the educated classes. But if you can, you will be in a zone of your own.

Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing

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picasso

This has sold for $179 million. What I have never understood is that if I buy a perfect print of this same painting and hang it in my house, or better, get a hand-painted copy, and pay $179 for it, what the person who now bought the painting gets for the million times more they paid for the original than I get for the copy. And there must have been at least one other person who was willing to go to $178 million for the price to have gone that high.

Mitchell Podolak – Doctor of Laws

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Mitch-Podolak

Not bad for a Grade IX dropout – a true Woody Guthrie, the most adventurous soul I ever knew. My mate from the days of nursery school, Mitchell Podolak, is about to receive an honorary doctorate from Brandon University in Manitoba. The citation reads:

Mitch Podolak is a prominent fixture in the North America folk music world and is the creator and past founding artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Winnipeg’s West End Cultural Centre, The Winnipeg International Children’s Festival and Home Routes/Chemin Nous, North America’s only house concert network. He is also the co-creator, founding artistic director and team mentor that founded the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso, Nova Scotia. Since 1974, Mr. Podolak has developed and led in the evolution of folk festival culture across Canada, and his efforts have seen hundreds of thousands of folk music fans come together in a common cultural cause. His methodological approach to structuring and motivating a volunteer corps in the art of running a festival has become the Canadian standard. His work is motivated by a love of folk music, of which his knowledge is extraordinary, and by a social view paralleling that of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Mr. Podolak’s strongest influences. In 2014, he received the Unsung Hero Award, the peer-driven lifetime achievement award of the Canadian Folk Music Awards. Mr. Podolak has had huge influence on the provincial and national cultural funding institutions that now all support folk music. Brandon University is recognizing his work with an honorary doctorate.

“I am pleased to recognize Lisa de Wilde and Mitch Podolak for their contributions to arts and culture as well as the creative industries on the national and international stage,” said Dr. Gervan Fearon, BU President and Vice-Chancellor. “Both have used their talent, leadership, and commitment to excellence to showcase the music, films and ideas of others. They inspire us all to find opportunities to strive for excellence in our own endeavours and to find opportunities to contribute to the success of others on whichever stage we perform.”

The conferring of an honorary Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at Brandon University bestows honour upon a deserving candidate who has made an outstanding contribution in one or more designated categories including the University, society, professional life, public service and the advancement of knowledge. Nominations are received from both the Brandon University and greater Westman communities.

No award has ever been more deserved. And it may truly be said for us both, aside from learning to play the banjo, all we really needed to know we learned in nursery school.

As for the banjo [and do note it is long-necked, five-stringed and wood-framed, just like mine], I might mention our days at Camp where in 1955, two musicians came to visit, one who played the concertina and the other, none other than Pete Seeger himself, who came and played the banjo [which was, and by no coincidence, long-necked, five-stringed and wood-framed]. I remember virtually nothing else from my camping days – this is, after all, sixty years ago – but I do remember this concert. The result has been that the only two instruments I own and play are the concertina and banjo. So whatever may have separated us in life, whether time, distance or politics, we share a love of folk music that transcends all else.