Elsewhere (258)

Mr Monbiot wants us to believe that “wealth causes misery.”
I’d rather heed a genuinely poor, working class boy made good:
” I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” Michael Caine.

You don’t hear the word much any more but in the not too distant past the term “moonbat” was in common use to be crazy or insane. The word was coined as a play on George Monbiot’s name.

Forget about sanitation and drudgery, and the limited options in life.
A few years ago, Mrs. Oik and I travelled to Botswana, where we went walking in the Kalahari with a clan of bushmen. They now live in government-provided housing with sanitation, but are able to demonstrate their centuries-old survival skills to tourists, such as this instance where the lady demonstrated that it was possible to extract half-digested berries from elephant poo which, when mixed with ashes, make a salve for treating insect bites. As our driver dropped us off I was only being semi-serious when I said to the missus sotto voce “Do you think it’s wise to go wandering about the desert with a bunch of half-naked savages?”.

An old favourite, probably from this blog… Wise Aboriginal Elders perform on QandA with Antony Hegarty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBIubgsfK8E
The other one that annoys me is the deference and official accommodation given to the performance of the Haka by South Pacific rugby teams. There’s no tradition worth preserving about a gang of men getting into the faces of a rival gang, puffing up their chests, gurning, and screaming threats. Seen outside the pub on Friday night, stripped of its exoticism, progressives recognize this as toxic masculinity, and in that case they happen to be correct. Sport used to be an alternative to those kinds of ugly displays (aggression was channeled into the space from the starting gun to the finish line, and competitors were gracious to each other outside that space), not a showcase and an endorsement.

We must see only how egalitarian and vibrant these exotic creatures are, if you squint and tilt your head, and then carefully turn away while the other stuff takes place.
That.

That too.
You do have to marvel at George’s readiness to tell other people how happy they really are, what with the terrible alienation caused by double glazing. And I suppose now’s a good time to revisit this revealing episode, in which Mr Monbiot encounters our own indigenous noble savages and things go badly wrong.

Re: The Noble Savage
I may have told this story before on these pages, and if so, my apologies. Some years back, my wife and I took in an exhibit of Plains Indian art work at the local museum. Lots of bead work representing horses and such, all decorating various implements, blankets and so forth.
Among the observers was a young mother loudly lecturing her daughter–and presumably the rest of us–about how marvelous the Plains “Horse Culture” was until “destroyed” by the evil White Menace.
I’d had enough. I mentioned that the horse came from the Spanish and the beads and iron implements on display came from the French. Also the Sioux Nations originated in the east and only migrated to the plains because they were forced out by the Algonquin and Iroquois.
She was not happy with me, but I felt very good.

Meanwhile, speaking of primitive cultures and beliefs…

Perhaps one of the reasons why people in Ethiopia appear to be happier than we are…
That “appear to be” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Monbiot’s pronouncement. Anyone who has lived in poverty, or at least experienced a period of being hard-up for money, and has worked long hours (at a thoroughly dispiriting job) to make ends meet will know that adopting a cheery attitude to life is a strategy to get you through the day. Life is bad enough without adopting an attitude that will make you, and those around you, even more miserable.
It is richer societies, such as ours, that enable and encourage the kind of self-absorption and hair-shirtiness displayed by Monbiot, Toynbee, Weir and all the other conceited bores of the patrician class.
It’s also important to note that whenever Monbiot bangs on about increasing wealth, he sees it in purely materialistic terms – people want more things. Well, certainly there are such acquisitive people (and good luck to them), but for the majority of us, we want to be richer so that we can reduce those lying-awake fears about how we’re going to manage in the future if we lose our jobs, or become sick, or if some other disaster befalls. We’d also like to look forward to a comfortable and safe old age, and increased leisure time, and so on. Perfectly respectable aspirations, you might say. If Monbiot were not such a professional spoilt brat, he might be able to see that. But alas, that’s the disdainful attitude that the establishment has for the lower orders (excepting a few discrete groups that they might find, from time to time, picturesque or deserving). And that Monbiot actually wants us all to be poorer, indicates to me at least, that he is not merely an air-headed, haute bourgeoisie show-off, but that he is fundamentally malicious and inhumane.

Reminds me of how the progressives in the US romanticize Native Americans, portraying them as living in absolute harmony with nature, and with other tribes, when in fact they exploited nature at every turn, and fought endlessly with other tribes.

canminuteman,
The word was coined as a play on George Monbiot’s name.
Actually, no. Perry DeHavilland, the creator of the term, claims he was not thinking of the Graun’s professional frowner when he coined “barking moonbat”, but the similarity was a happy accident.

This shit has now gone too far…
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10278

There’s no tradition worth preserving about a gang of men getting into the faces of a rival gang, puffing up their chests, gurning, and screaming threats.
So WWE then?
Reminds me of how the progressives in the US romanticize Native Americans[…] when in fact they exploited nature at every turn, and fought endlessly with other tribes.
So this, then.

Projection.
Monbiot’s intentional self-descriptions are quite funny too. He refers to himself as both a liberal and an anarchist.
No laughing at the back.
In 2012, our progressive-egalitarian-liberal-anarchist dismissed those who disagree with him as morally and mentally inferior. “The other side,” he told us, is “on average more stupid than our own.” “Conservative ideology,” he added, “is the critical pathway from low intelligence to racism.” And all of this in contrast with noble beings such as himself, who are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.” And he says all this despite his nakedly authoritarian temperament, and despite the fact that every other Monbiot article is a demand that other people should be imposed upon gratuitously or treated as if they were particularly dim children.

You Brits seem to have a corner on the market for strange people…
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-eat-mum-christmas-day-11706456

There’s no tradition worth preserving about a gang of men getting into the faces of a rival gang, puffing up their chests, gurning, and screaming threats.
Fuck off RR. It’s not your tradition, so obviously you see no point in it.
The haka is centuries old, and very much not one of those made up “authentic” traditions. It is way older, for example, than kilts and tartans and all that faux Highland bullshit that Lowlanders go for.
The All Blacks have doing the haka for over 100 years. Flower of Scotland was written in 1974. So when Scotland meet NZ at rugby, should I insist that the Scots get rid of their ridiculously schmaltzy song on the basis that I don’t like it?
Sport used to be an alternative to those kinds of ugly displays
So a sport that is about channeling aggression is OK, but a dance before it isn’t?
That’s some impressive dissonance you have going on there!

I sure hope someone has explained to the mom-eating lady about kuru!
Unless her mom was a child or lady tribesman from New Guinea and she ate her mom’s brain before the cremation, no danger there.

♫ Oh a spoon full of mummy helps the pudding go down,
In the most appalling way ! ♫

I coulda sworn I read that the kuru prions can develop spontaneously; that’s where the first case in New Guinea seems to have come from, and then once they ate her, the thing snowballed. And I know I read that cremation does not render the brain material non-infectious. So if anybody is thinking “What a nice idea, maybe when Grandma dies…”. Don’t. Not because it’s weird, but because it could be dangerous.
And it IS weird, of course, but not necessarily any weirder than spending 5 figures on a box to bury. When Dad died in 2016, the most expensive coffin offered was $35K. (We didn’t buy it, partly because no one could afford it, partly because he’d made it clear not to waste a lot of money.)
And if you’re thinking what’s really weird is all that reading about kuru 😊, actually, it’s all that reading about autism, during the course of which, you pick up any number of interesting little neurological tidbits.

I coulda sworn I read that the kuru prions can develop spontaneously…
Kuru is specific to a small area of New Guinea and is basically eradicated after eliminating cannibalism, however with an incubation of up to 50 years, it cannot yet be said to be eliminated for certain.

It looks every bit as silly, put-on, and self-parodying as the WWE pre-match interviews.
So it’s “silly” and “threatening”? Nice!
Meanwhile Frenchmen in tears as they sing the Marseillaise (about butchering their enemies) before a football game is perfectly acceptable behaviour for grown men? And Brits crowding the streets to wave joyously at their grossly dysfunctional royal family’s birthdays is what any self-respecting country should do?
We all have our foibles, especially around symbols of national pride. I try not to mock others’ merely because they look odd to me.

Kuru is specific to a small area of New Guinea and is basically eradicated after eliminating cannibalism, however with an incubation of up to 50 years, it cannot yet be said to be eliminated for certain.
This public service announcement brought to you by Schottzie’s Bar & Grill.

And I know I read that cremation does not render the brain material non-infectious.

Only if you are able to find proteins in the resulting ashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
After serving in USAREUR in the early 1980’s (where we were fed British beef), I am considered a possible future victim of Mad Cow disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy). I have been unable to donate blood for almost 20 years now. Needless to say, I have a personal interest in how that disease promulgates and presents itself.

Projection.
The dishonesties that underpin these kinds of claims scarcely need pointing out, though some examples can be quite revealing of the mindset and the contortions it requires. The penultimate item here, for instance, regarding a non-existent aboriginal written language, suggests a collective dishonesty. Or at least a voluntary forgetfulness.
And likewise, when Emer O’Toole, a Guardian contributor and “post-colonial theorist” with mad skills in Gender Studies, wanted us to believe that all cultures, past and present, are equally vibrant and noble, except of course the culture in which she currently flourishes, and on which opprobrium must be heaped ostentatiously and often. Again, there’s an air of contrivance, of carefully avoiding the obvious.
Ms O’Toole bemoaned the colonial propagation of Shakespeare, whose works she denounced as “full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores.” And worse, “a powerful tool of empire, transported to foreign climes along with the doctrine of European cultural superiority.” The possibility that at any given time one set of values and insights might be preferable to another, even objectively better and markedly so, is apparently something that a “post-colonial theorist” mustn’t think about.
Her article was accompanied by a photograph of New Zealand’s Ngakau Toa theatre company performing Troilus and Cressida in a distinctively Maori style. To me, it looked fun and worth the price of a ticket. But this cross-cultural fusion offended Ms O’Toole, who dismissed notions of the Bard’s universality as “uncomfortably colonial.” She then presumed to take umbrage on behalf of all past colonial subjects, whose own views on Shakespeare and literature she chose not to relate. She did, however, get quite upset about “our sense of cultural superiority” – a sense of superiority that, she insisted, has long been “disavowed by all but the crazies.”
With that in mind, and at risk of being indelicate, I can’t help wondering how Ms O’Toole might have felt had she been among the 19th century English colonists who encountered a Maori culture that was all but prehistoric, with no discernible literature or science, no enlightened gender politics, an average lifespan of about 30 years, and in which cannibalism was not unknown. Faced with such things – perhaps we could call them “defunct social mores” – I’m sure Ms O’Toole would have resisted the wicked urge to think herself a little more culturally advanced.
When not romanticising cultures in which she would be unlikely to survive for more than a three-day weekend, Ms O’Toole boasts of how her feminist boyfriends have thought her “brave” for retaining armpit hair.

You could have stopped at ‘feminist boyfriends’.
But it’s strange to watch these rhetorical dances, which suggest bad faith, a careful avoidance of certain, rather obvious implications.
And as Jacob pointed out at the time,

It’s not every day you find a lefty who’s so right-on she doesn’t think brown people should be performing Shakespeare at a World Shakespeare Festival.

And yet Ms O’Toole’s views are not uncommon among her peers.

Richard, that’s awful! I hope you stay well.