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Umbrage

August 11, 2007 No Comments

A collection of round-the-houses grumblings and passive-aggressive notes. The first one highlights the problems of collective living and the definition of a full bin. The second is from Nancy to her animated neighbours.

Definition_of_full Nancy_needs_her_rem_time

Others concern service at diners, and roommates, prophylactics and Google. (H/T, Coconut Jam.)














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Written by: David
Culture Ideas Politics Postmodernism

Cultural Confidence

August 10, 2007 2 Comments

The following extract might be of interest. It’s from a speech given in May by Theodore Dalrymple, titled The Paradoxes of Cultural Confidence. Dalymple touches on a range of issues, including the absurd denial and fragility inherent to Islamist belief, and the denial within Islam more generally; but I’ve highlighted a few passages that relate to recent discussions here on contrarian posturing and misplaced rebellion.   

“If you believe that the history of your culture is nothing but a catalogue of horror, massacre and the oppression of others, then you will not be very assiduous in its defence once it comes under concerted attack. Among intellectuals, at any rate, the history of crimes and catastrophes is more popular than that of achievement; and this view eventually communicates itself to society at large, to the point when it is not even realized that there is any achievement to record. In any case, there is a natural tendency, at least in the modern world, to take progress for granted the moment it is made, but never to accept problems as being an inevitable part of human life… 

Strangely enough, complete scepticism about the possibility of reaching truth – this denial that there was any truth independent of human interests to be reached – was not incompatible with the strongest moral views, though these moral view were always in diametrical opposition to established moral traditions. The connotation of the notion of transgression changed from negative to positive. It was a moral duty to challenge everything, and to overturn as much as you could.

This resulted in a very odd psychological and philosophical attitude. It was accepted by many intellectuals as an unquestionable assumption that, in its confrontation with the rest of the world, the Western world was always in the wrong, ex officio as it were, because of its superior power; that because there was no such thing as truth, the claims of Western civilization to have developed methods for discovery of the truth, organized science for example, were merely a mask for its greed and power-hunger; and that therefore a sympathy for those outside the Western tradition who claimed to know the truth, moral and religious, was a sign of virtue, provided only that the moral and religious truth they claimed to know was in conflict with Western power. In other words, the test of virtue became the degree to which one was prepared to reject and revile one’s own society…”

The full speech can be read here. More Dalrymple here. Related, on “cultural cringe.” The notion that the ability to defend oneself denotes villainy and that weakness denotes virtue by default is also addressed here.

(H/T, Daimnation!)

Feel free to sponsor my counter-revolutionary tendencies.














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Written by: David
Art Culture Politics Postmodernism

Rebellion (2)

July 31, 2007 4 Comments

Further to recent comments on rebellion, hostility to bourgeois values and art’s political lockstep, Fabian Tassano’s Iconoclasm by Decree seems relevant.

“Literature should be political and … should unmask the rottenness of bourgeois culture.” Lenin.

“Question: How do you know when a society’s culture has stopped being genuinely challenging and iconoclastic? Answer: When a government minister insists that ‘challenge’ and ‘iconoclasm’ are essential components of culture… A mediocracy has ersatz versions of everything related to intellectual or artistic independence: questioning, analysis, scepticism, radicalism, and so on. No real questioning or radicalism is involved, since that would be too dangerous.”

More.














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Written by: David
Culture

Tricycles of Beijing

April 25, 2007 No Comments

Via 1+1=3, I stumbled across Mac Kane’s portfolio of Beijing tricycles, many of which have been modified to serve as mobile businesses, as well as for hauling people and an improbable range of objects.

Beijing_2  Beijing_4  Beijing_3  Beijing_5

Polar Inertia also has portfolios of Tai O stilt houses and Hong Kong noodle shops.














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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.