[tolerant] does not mean equivalent

Here's a hypothetical.

I meet a visiting student from Zimbabwe, before the new academic year starts and invite her to dinner to meet my family. She turns out to be good company and the kids adore her.

Is she one of the family? No. Is she my gender? No. Is she my colour? No. Is she of the same background and experience? No. Do we listen to the same music and read the same literature? No.

Is she welcome at our home? Yes. She's a highly interesting person.

By any stretch of the imagination, she is not equivalent, she is not equal. She is included in this activity and more than this, she's welcome. This is beyond tolerance.

Do I invite her to a faculty meeting? No. She is not included here, not because we "don't want her" or don't "recognize her equivalence with the other professors as being just as good as them if they'll only let her" but through sheer common sense - she wouldn't want to be bored by a bunch of fuddy-duddies plus she can't speak the language.

So no, she's not equal here. Sanity. Common sense. Tolerance and inclusion in some areas does not equal Equivalence and Relativism. These latter two are catch-all rash generalizations based on no known reality in society.

They are political correctness which, by definition, is insane.

Now the Feministi at the university get to hear of her non-inclusion in the faculty meeting and press the board to decree that she MUST be included in all faculty meetings as this is a "tolerant, caring, all-inclusive campus".

So there we all are, not in a meeting but in a large auditorium with the professors lost in the middle, discussing the next academic year and surrounded by all manner of humanity, partying, listening to loud music [tolerance, remember, on pain of dismissal] and how much work gets done?

But at least it's politically correct and the Femnisti at the other end of the campus, whose own meeting no one wishes to attend, have a nice all woman discussion, in the cushiest armchaired room, making resolutions about who else they can find to "equivalentize" this academic year.

Do you detect a slightly intolerant note in this article?

By the way - here's an interesting exercise. Type "university" into Google and see what comes up on the first few pages. I was very surprised.

[culture and heritage] a fading memory

One of Banksy's

I swear I'm not a killjoy. In former days, if you liked breasts, you used to buy the Sun; if you wanted something harder, there was a little shop down the road or there was Soho. There was a place for tat and good luck to those who lapped it up.

There were others who preferred broadsheets - papers like The Times [former], The FT, Globe and Mail, NYT and so on and though a pain in the butt to read on the train, still, it was a good read once you had it folded into position and the crackling stopped. Plus it was great for a Millwall Brick.

Into this category fell the Melbourne Age. Staid old Melbourne was represented in this paper whilst for the print-challenged, there was always the Sun. The Age carried weight and conveyed authority. Now part of the Fairfax "stable", here are the sorts of headlines today:

1. Beach orgy shocks conservative Taiwan

2. Pastor had sex with daughters

3. Heroin addicted elephant to rejoin herd

Now I'm wondering if the April decision to turn all these into tabloids is connected with the distressing drop in taste over the past few years, rivalling Murdoch who's got most of the world press anyway.

However, that's not the most distressing thing. The most distressing thing is this:

Good Friday seems certain to become a part of next year's AFL draw, with the once-sacrosanct space on the football calendar likely to be filled by Carlton and Hawthorn.

Now I don't give a toss about the football these days [rugby and cricket are different] but I'm sure you see the point I'm getting at. Good Friday was always the last bastion and even when Easter Sunday fell to commercial pressures, GF remained respected in some sort of misunderstanding of the relative importance of the days.

Now we have yet another example of the relentless dismantling and rooting out of the last vestiges of Christendom and the west's cultural heritage, then they'll turn on the remaining believers and out of pure spite try to round them up and disappear them.

Oh how the west howled with anger when the Palestinians cheered and cavorted as the World Trade Centre collapsed and will the west do the same now that the new paganism in society and the g-dless blogosphere will gleefully chortle at this latest "victory for reason"?

Can you imagine Iran scheduling a match for the feast of Ashoura or Israel scheduling one for Yom Kippur? Or a Walpurgis Night Derby?

The jackboot is stomping out the flickering candle of Christian hope and joy wherever it can seek and destroy and one has to ask what more do they want? Why will they allow freedom of worship to all bar the Christian?

A whole generation has now grown up uneducated [and I charge that one must be of a former generation to be able to judge that], with a society now disintegrating around them [witness the subject matter on blogs and the divorce and crime stats], pressing on blindly, obliviously rudderless, down, down, down to the new feudal darkness of cold rationalism [as distinct from reason], the new 1984 and Brazil.

Surely that's enough for the forces arrayed against reason?

Not in the least. They have to spit on Good Friday and stomp out every last vestige of the ethical underpinning of our society, fearing something might go wrong and someone, somewhere, might stop and shout: "Hey, where are we all headed? What are we doing? Hey people, we're being lied to. Wake up!"

Pity suicide is not allowed because I now find myself completely at odds with the tat and mediocracy I see all about. I don't mind saying I'm feeling old, irrelevant and marginalized and I'm wondering how much is me and how much is what's happening out there.

I'm going to bed early.

By the way, I apologize in advance to all my friends for the crack at the g-dless blogosphere and the new paganism. I'm just a little distracted, that's all.

[computer] decisions, decisions

Every time I boot the computer now, I have to press reset but in the past two days, I've had to press it twice each time. Just now, I had to go through a long process to get in.

It's the video card and the Catch 22 is that I'd gladly replace it but it is of such an ancient type that no one sells it any more. So, the alternative is to get a new type but the motherboard won't accept the new type so I need a new computer.

I spoke to my Apple seller friend today and I'm getting a MacBook. We thought long and hard about getting the 15 inch Pro and it's not a case of money - it's more the usage of all the bells and whistles and putting the money where it's needed.

But this is also fraught because apparently there are new components coming in soon and it would be silly to buy the current model as is. Why is nothing straightforward?

The good news is that once this thing is up, I'll be able to zip from site to site and visit everyone rapidly. The downside is that at any moment now, say tomorrow, this current computer will irrevocably break down and therefore there'll be no site until the new components arrive and don't forget this is Russia.

My computer mates cannot believe the pressure the inadequate current components are having to operate under so do not fear if I stop posting - you now know what's happening.

[edward pilgrim] took on the council and lost

Click photo to enlarge pic.

Most of you are aware of the start of Arthur Dent's adventures when the council wanted to knock down his house to build a bypass:

It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wanted to knock down his house and build an bypass instead. Mr Prosser said: "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time you know."

"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine month."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."

Are you aware of the incidents which gave Douglas Adams the idea in the first place? Many blogs, such as Guthrum the Old and Man in a Shed are bringing all sorts of government inanities to us but this one was more than an inanity - it was at best tragic misunderstanding and possibly sharp practice and at worst, callous indifference.

Do read the short Wiki version of it here:

[hairstyles] getting one's values straight

In the comments section of my recent post on David Davis, the man who should be PM, the following exchanges appeared:

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Just read TD's reply and have to say I agree with him that a change of leader is inappropriate at the moment, though Davis has nicer hair! Why am I bothered anyway as I would never vote Tory??

Sir James Robison said...

Nicer hair - now that's an angle I hadn't considered.

ThunderDragon said...

Nicer hair... aren't we back to style over substance here? :-)

Julie said...

Nice hair matters these days, it matters. :-)

This clearly had to be followed up so I ask you to consider this montage and nominate which hairstyle you'd vote for [by the way, the closest to mine is The Enterprise]:

Click for the big pic

[barre] darling of the luminaries

Hmmm, that tree will have to come down, once we can exterminate those fr--in' bees…

Excellent article in the FT by David Buchan [August 26] and not just for this reason:

Raymond Barre, who died on Saturday at the age of 83, was the favourite French politician of the world's financial and business elite.

[…] Above all, he was an internationalist, a member of the shadowy Trilateral Commission, bringing together luminaries from Europe, the US and Japan and, for many years after he ceased being prime minister, the main rapporteur of the Davos World Economic Forum.

Had to admire Buchan's courage - this is not some obscure blog but the FT, for goodness sake. His "luminaries" reference was particularly chuckle producing.

A friend of mine asked me today what I was going to do when they came for me and I said I'd offer to join them if they didn't "disappear" me first.

As for the article, do read it but I take issue with the adjective "shadowy" - there's nothing shadowy about them at all. They publish every damned thing they decide somewhere - as with the hyperspace bipass plans in the Hitchhiker's Guide and the incident it was based on.