That's it, that's when it jumped the shark, nuked the fridge, and fried the coke, this bloody interminable, endless reptile conversation about the crisis in Western Civilisation.
To drag in a Premier whocouldn't organise a single tram in a CBD, and who mainly exists to give developers their dreaming is beyond the pond's tolerance …
Gladys wouldn't know a lick of common sense if it bit her on the bum, but the reptiles were triumphant …
It took two of them to drag Gladys into the conversation and one of them to tweet about it?
The only thing the pond knew with any certainty was that it would be short, and the usual suspects would have to be dragged into the litany to make up the length …
Such a stupid woman … and enraged, the pond headed off to the ANU site to check out courses it might indulge in if it wanted to …
You know, like six units in Advanced Continental Philosophy or six units in Nietzsche, six units on Leviathan, and so on and so forth … go on, check out the units here …
What about Eng Lit, the pond's favourite wayback when?
Well there's such dissidents as Shakespeare and Jane Austen, six units each, and "Revolution and Romanticism in British Literature 1789-1832", and Modern American Fiction, and gasp … units in film!! Go on, look here before enrolling …
What about history, another pond favourite wayback when?
Well there's the usual, a bit of historiography and Europe in the Modern Era, and Clashes of Empire, 1450 to the present, medieval history, the French revolution and Napoleon, the birth of modernity in Britain 1688-1848, Tudor-Stuart England, c. 1485-1918, the Great War, pretty much everything the pond once studied, along with some fresh variations designed to shock the reptiles, but entirely acceptable from an academic viewpoint - go on, go historical here.
What about good old Europe? Well, amazingly enough you can get a Bachelor of European Studies, and the young swine can even score travel to Europe for an 'in-country' study at a partner institution. Why in the pond's day, you useless indulged prats, we went off to the Tamworth show with the French teacher to try and describe the incredible events on view in coarsely accented French …
You know, 'voici la glace' and all that stuff ...
Amongst the European courses? Endless studies of Europe, with plenty of bonus Ruski and Turkish history … (click on the 'study' tab to view).
If the pond started today, it'd be dead before it began to scratch the surface of all the bloody yadda yadda about Western Civilisation currently on view at ANU …
… which is why this blown-in sceptic tank's splash was so offensively stupid …
Well no, if the pond might speak plain Australian, you useless fuckwit, it didn't reject the study of Western civilisation, it rejected a particular offer of funding with an obvious bias, made patently clear by the singular stupidity of the onion muncher, always a suppository of wisdom …
And the last thing we need to do is import yet another Jews v. Islamics routine into the country.
Here's the thing. The Yanks are currently the last people on earth to talk about Western Civilisation, given that they elected a President who routinely berates Europeans and even innocent, hapless Canadians.
If ever there was a country in rampant retreat from Western Civilisation, it's the United States …
Our man Rubin is probably going to show a little sensitivity about the Donald ...
Oh dear, even worse … not just waving the 'Never Trump' banner, but also deeply into the Persians, when properly he should have been studying the fruits of Western Civilisation …
No doubt the argument is that we need to study Persian civilisation before we are able to understand just how fucked Western Civilisation is when we attempt to understand and evaluate it … or some such thing …
You know, remembering how two world wars and an occasional Holocaust testify to its humane, moral, intellectual ideas and standards in history … (go on, head off to ANU to study those astonishing displays of moral and intellectual ideas and standards) ...
With the greatest respect, why not just fuck off back to the United States and try fix the symptoms of terminal disease currently infecting the body politic there …
Good luck with the fixing, but if that's the fruits of Western Civilisation, perhaps just build a wall, build a wall …
The Great Rubin says: "Western society has its faults but ...it has generated the most humane moral and intellectual ideas and standards in history."
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, maybe, but please do tell when "Western society" is ever going to actually live by all of those wonderful "ideas and standards".
It not just the appalling horrors of the 20thC, or having a "democratically elected" President who is perfectly at ease contemplating "20 or 30 million deaths" in Korea, it's the whole history of wars and conquests and enslavements for the past 2600 years (counting 'Western society' to have begun with Draco the Lawgiver, a decade or two before 600BC).
All of those lovely religious wars and all the people tortured and killed in them, the plagues, the famines, the purges, the suppression of the legitimate aspirations of the lower classes (see Martin Luther for instance) - all of that. Sure, heaps of wonderful "ideas and standards" but never any appreciable effort to actually implement them and live by them. And I'll bet that none of the 'Ramsay Clique' have ever heard of Euler or John Graunt.
Not to mention that Ramsay clearly hugely overcharged sick people for his services to be able to leave a Au$3.3 billion legacy.
"...Australia's achievements were overwhelmingly positive..."
ReplyDeleteexcept during the Howard years
Not so good during the kanaka 'blackbirding' times either. And pretty damn bad when the Tasmanian aboriginals were driven to extinction (at least of the so-called 'fullbloods'). Not all that terrific during quite a few times of aboriginal massacres either.
DeleteIn fact, really only any good in the times of Fisher and Chifley, though Stanley Bruce was kinda ok too.