The pond weakened, broke, shattered on the ground … after all, its mission in life is to keep up with the crusading reptiles in relation to the crisis in Western Civilisation, and naturally anything little Johnny had to say on the matter was distilled essence of precious Western Civilisation bodily fluids …
The pond's only excuse was that it tossed the muck into the late arvo slot so that innocent minds might be spared ...
The pond's only excuse was that it tossed the muck into the late arvo slot so that innocent minds might be spared ...
Strangely, however the reptile coverage was a tad terse …
This wasn't compelling … and was all the more bizarre for being headed how the west was won …
But the pond finally worked out the covert message, celebrating little Johnny as the deputy sheriff…
But the pond finally worked out the covert message, celebrating little Johnny as the deputy sheriff…
Kill all the Indians, or the Iraqis, or whatever … and how pleasing, if inevitable, that little Johnny would have some affection for Ulster unionists. Kill all the Catholics too ...
Still, it was a little short, and the pond thought it might be a whiz to compare and contrast the Fairfaxian coverage … which can, it has to be said, be found here ...
Well it's a better header … reminding the pond of that Arnold poem, in full here ...
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant bigoted armies in search of lost WMDs clash by night.
Hmm, the pond can't guarantee the textual accuracy of that last line, evocative as it is of little Johnny's contribution to the crisis in Western Civilisation …
Well it's pleasing to hear that campuses are now torpid beds of resolute indifference, full of zombified, tranquillised students, but gosh darn it, then little Johnny had to go and get back into bed with the onion muncher ...
So there you have it, chancellor in the audience anxious to confirm 'here no lefties, no lefties here', little Johnny still wants a course in favour of Western Civilisation, just like the onion muncher, that being where his intellectual narrowness of mind insists he must go …
And finally the pond had to celebrate this outing from Griffith U ...
Of course it was put behind the paywall, which is probably fair, because Andrew O'Neil entirely missed the point ...
Now this is all very well, but clearly O'Neil hasn't done much history.
Here's the thing. The reptiles are on a crusade. There's no point talking rigour, or evidence, or contestation, or all the other fine academic words for reasonable, rational discourse and disputation.
The reptiles are in favour of Western Civilisation, and by golly, if anyone can't see its charms, they'll be hung, drawn and quartered … because that's what crusaders do.
The reptiles go crusading for a living. Being completely useless to society, they rely on academics like O'Neil to get agitated and hurt, and scribble a few words in reply, then they fling it behind the paywall, so that the base might get fed another morsel, further evidence of the crisis in Western Civilisation ...
This sort of special pleading cuts no ice with the reptiles. O'Neil might as well have offered his spit to a griddle ...
We're in the age of the Donald, where rampant hypocrisy is all the go, so it's time to wrap it up with a celebration of all that's good about the current state of Western Civilisation …
Johnny Winston: "...[he] would "very much" like to come to an agreement with the University of Sydney to create a Western civilisation-themed degree, and that he won't admit defeat..."
ReplyDeleteExcept that:
1. the Ramsay thing isn't a degree. According to the "indicative curriculum" it comprises only 16 of the 24 study units required for a degree. In short, it is only 2/3rds of a degree.
2. It is not "Western civilisation-themed", it is basically just a book club (with a teensy bit of art and music thrown in). The students read a book, and then they have a tutorial to discuss it, then they go on to another book and so on. And that's about it.
"Here's the thing. The reptiles are on a crusade."
Quite right, DP. Just like Trump they're in constant 'campaign mode' because they know no other way of existing, and because shouting at their own set of clouds is all they can do.
"I don't admit defeat", says Howard. So he is starting a new campaign in the mountains (like Castro?) at Blackheath! https://www.bluemountainsgazette.com.au/story/5515879/former-prime-minister-john-howard-to-address-blackheath-philosophy-forum/
ReplyDeleteBlue Mountains Gazette: "...our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Enlightenment tradition, and that “appreciating it is not an exercise in cultural triumphalism, rather recognition of a complex and enduring historical reality”."
DeleteExcept that it isn't any such thing (apart from leaving out a whole swathe of other significant influences). It isn't a degree for starters, at most it's 2/3rds of a degree (and that's 2/3rds of an Aussie 3 year degree, not of a 4 year yanqui degree).
It's just a bloody book club - and a very limited one at that. For instance there's stuff all about the last 400 or so years in it, and hence there's no science in it whatsoever, and very little philosophy either. And absolutely no sociology or psychology and certainly no modern economics.
In a recent post, Brad DeLong wrote about "The Advance of Technological and Organisational Knowledge" [ http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/implications-of-the-acceleration-of-the-pace-of-growth-of-the-value-of-human-knowledge-an-in-take-from-slouching-towards-ut.html ]
In which he wrote about how:
"It began in 1870, when the combination of the development of the industrial research lab, the screw-propellered iron-hulled steamship, the submarine telegraph network, and America's openness to (European) immigration brought the world out of the age of gunpowder empires and set it on the escalator to prosperous modernity."
Do you reckon you could find even a faint whisper about any of that in Ramsay ? And talking about "gunpowder empires", do you think there'd be any mention of Marlborough, Napoleon or Wellington ? Or the bloodstained and merciless English imperialism in India (where Wellington 'perfected' his trade) or the 30 to 35 million Indians that perished by starvation in famines under the British Raj.
It's all part of "Western civilisation" though.