Reheated (61)
For newcomers and the forgetful, two items from the archives:
A leftist compulsion is pondered.
A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.
At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree - that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common… The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.
Guardian columnist denounces Western medicine as “outdated,” champions use of bush dung.
Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.” “Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior,” Ms Blow informs us. Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear.
Despite attempts to romanticise aboriginal medicine, the persistent differences in health and lifespan rather speak for themselves. If aboriginal approaches, untainted by “colonial organisations,” are so praiseworthy and desirable, one wonders why aboriginal people suffer from alarming rates of diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis, chlamydia and any number of other afflictions – from cardiovascular problems to hearing loss and disastrous oral hygiene. And the less contact they have with the “biomedical models” that so offend Ms Blow, the more pronounced the disparities seem to be. Being “disruptive” and “the antithesis of colonial” doesn’t appear to be working out awfully well.
There’s more, should you crave it, in the greatest hits.
Also, open thread.
Ownership of land, as nasty as this sounds, is always determined by use of force. If you don’t have an army, you don’t own your land. You lease it, in the form of taxes, from the prevailing power.
As for the Americas and such, can someone explain to me how this worked? Did the first tribe of people who crossed that Siberian or whatever “land bridge” own ALL of the Americas? North, south, central? 100% of it? When the Europeans arrived, did the indigenous peoples, numbered according to what I can somewhat quickly google at (supposedly) 60 million or so, “own” 100% of all that land? By what right? Also per quickly google, the population of Europe was around 70-80 million or so on half the land mass area. Was it wrong for those Europeans to cross the Atlantic in ships? If they had trekked their asses across the EuroAsian land mass and walked across possibly frozen ice, would that have entitled them to as much of a share as the last “indigenous” tribe?
Do these questions occur to anyone else or am I some sort of mental freak?
Other politically incorrect questions include “What does land ownership mean when we know that American Indians engaged in near constant wars of conquest and genocide ever since they crossed the land bridge from Asia?” Perhaps a legitimate conclusion is that Europeans should hold the land in perpetual stewardship lest that genocide continue until the Sun goes dark.
Do these questions occur to anyone else or am I some sort of mental freak?
I’ve been asking the same questions since the early 70s after listening to a Mexican-American teacher in my high school angrily lecture the gringos in the class that they are living on land “stolen” from Mexicans.
No questions allowed …
Especially pointing out that “Mexicans” are as “white” as any other Euro-descendent on the North American continent really causes conniptions.
OK…but WHY DOESN’T ANYONE OF PROMINENCE ASK THESE QUESTIONS? Why am I the lone freak? Why is there NO ONE on the right suggesting that if anyone needs to be reprogrammed it’s those who believe Trump told people to drink bleach or that the words “We don’t need you to do that” are EXACTLY equivalent to being told, no ORDERED, “do not do that”? Why don’t our “leaders” on the right go on the offensive? Why always the passive, excuse making?