Lightening ship
Mark Steyn, quoting the Australian, notices that feminist Germaine Greer finds it "too tricky" to denounce 'honor killings' in Darfur.
Pamela Bone to Germaine Greer in Melbourne last week:
I then asked why it was that Western feminists seemed so reluctant to speak out against things such as honour killings.
Greer: "It's very tricky. I am constantly being asked to go to Darfur to interview rape victims. I can talk to rape victims here. Why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victims?"
Questioner (me): "Because it's so much worse there."
Greer: "Who says it is?"
Questioner: "I do, because I've been there."
Greer: "Well, it is just very tricky to try to change another culture. We let down the victims of rape here. We haven't got it right in our own courts. What good would it do for me to go over there and try to tell them what to do? I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we're all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast."
The left is too deeply invested in the narrative of self-hatred to ever hear danger approaching from without. They're stuck in an ultimate conflict of interest between their ideology and the survival of their ideology; between their freedom to destroy their culture and the freedoms that culture guarantees. That's why in Europe it is often only people like the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who can take up the cudgels for women being hunted down like animals in through the green fields of England by their Islamic relatives, even though theoretically a British Imam's daughter condemned for having converted to Christianity could have gone to Greer, not to Nazi-Ali, for help. Dr. Nazir-Ali doesn't have to protect a circle of leftist supporters nor a public record of foolish utterance from the danger of sudden common sense.
If the Left wants to be free to think again, it must first of all divest itself, in the way it encourages everyone to divest itself from Israel, of its own fascist ideology. Oops. I repeat myself. I already observed they're stuck in an ultimate conflict of interest between their ideology and the survival of their ideology. Reboot and try again.
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Also note that feminists have been known to oppose pre-natal care programs on the basis that they endanger the right to abortions.
And I think I have quoted David Horowitz more than once in these pages, in his remarks concerning an anti-war rally: "Lesbians marched side by side with Islamic radicals, despite the fact that the Islamists would have the lesbians killed if they were in power."
It is not just self-hatred for the culture that produced them - there is also simple practicality. The Left's power is based in large part on their having drawn the boundaries of their "big tent" so large that it has become impossible to admit that it has any boundaries at all. They can't afford to throw what should be the most repulsive elements out of their tent because they need them. And besides, if they started making moral judgements, who knows where that might lead?
Wretchard, I know you are fond of programming analogies. What the best metaphor here? There's a bug in the left's software. Is it type mismatch? Infinite loop? Buffer overrun?
Please do not forget that Germaine Greer also condemned opposition to the practice of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation)—better known by the misleading and politically correct term, Female Circumcision—as "an attack on cultural identity".
Here we have the ne plus ultra of cultural relativism, tolerance for the intolerable. There can be few more hideously barbaric practices than the sexual mutilation of a healthy human being. Would anyone care to guess what the response would be if the village imam was asked to have the glans of his penis amputated without anesthesia?
Even without global terrorism or genocide against the Jews, Islam's institutionalized misogyny is reason enough alone for its abolition. That the Liberal Left is able to countenance such Neanderthal savagery serves to illuminate how illimitless their own moral boundaries are.
I was having lunch with a woman that I know. She is a very independent-minded individual who has sung as a professional jazz musician, toured Europe with her band many times, worked as an administrative professional and currently runs her own business. Suffice to say that she is a person of the world.
She was absolutely aghast when I stated that anyone who immigrates to America is making a frank admission that America has a superior culture. She simply could not wrap her mind around the fact that one culture could be better than another. I gently reminded her that in Saudi Arabia she would be subject to lashes for going uncovered in public, let alone having lunch with me, an unrelated male.
Even this could not get her to abandon her deep-seated cultural relativism. Not even pointing out Islam's bigoted murder of African Muslims in Darfur could change her mind. This, despite the fact that she is a black woman.
Just a minor example of how immune to logic or reason liberals can be.
What the best metaphor here?
Inadmissible unbounded equation?
Back in the Clinton Administration (perhaps I should say the first Clinton administration) the feminists blew their bona fides when they sided with Bill against his victims.
That they side with the most heinous anti-woman forces in history came as no surprise to me.
Software metaphor: Sometimes you get this when no new inputs are permitted and you end up with absurd outputs arising from continuous self-referentiality. I don't have a proper term for it since I am an amateur programmer at best.
As to the snippet itself, it is a showcase in how to be deftly manipulative.
1. The interviewer asked about GG's reticence in speaking up against honor killings. GG replies by converting this into a discussion about rape. That allows GG to introduce the false sense of equivalanece (i.e. we have rape, they have rape, who's to say who has it better?). But honor killings are almost unheard of in western cultures and that's where the topic should have been brought back. GG 1, Interviewer 0.
2. GG tries to score a second goal by confirming the moral equivalence. Interviewer naively reacts and blocks it and says, "It is worse there, I saw it." She thinks she has scored a point. Wrong. The fact is that by allowing the interviewer to win this "nice blocking move" GG has now established the legitimacy of the first premise i.e. that the discussion of honor killings is the same as that about rape. Notice that this has now gone uncontested. The two are now, sadly, interchangeable and no further discussion of honor killings re-enters the snippet.
3. GG then volunteers that there's no point "going there and telling them off". The second and crucial dirty trick that Interviewer falls victim to. See, the issue was never about going to Darfur and telling the authorities off. The issue was about speaking up against "honor" killings in Darfur and against these horrific medieval practices and doing so RIGHT HERE on Western campuses alongside other protests that go "stop the genocide" and other such sentiments. Interviewer was not asking GG to go THERE and tell anybody anything. GG transformed the proper accusation of deafening silence HERE into a rebuttal about why it made no sense for her to go THERE and tell anybody anything. As if that was ever on the cards.
Interviewer stood there unable to see or react to the manipulation. GG 2, Interviewer 0.
My point is: Don't think of the GGs of the world as unable to see the truth. They see the truth, have seen it for a long time, and dismissed it because it does not conform to their larger agenda. They will abide any evil if it is in service of the larger agenda. And they have come to believe that because they can run circles around lesser truth seekers, that they are smarter. And that that makes them right.
Do the Left really have a positive goal? Even a destructive goal? Or is it just some kind of post-modern pseudocode you must on no account ever try to compile?
Maybe it's a kind of vaporware or some kind of recursive function that ultimately resolves to a null; and hence doesn't work. It operates on the principle of promising a result and in the meantime requires inputs. But at every so-called runtime it gives you report with a fancy header and a demand for more inputs.
At the end of the trail practically every leftist descriptor is the exact opposite of its eventual output. When you see something described as a "peace loving country" you can be certain it is bankrupting itself from military expenditure. Anything described as a "Democratic People's Republic of Something" is probably a slave state run by hereditary apparatchiks.
That's why such phrases like "human rights", "women's liberation", "environmental protection" etc are terms of irony rather than actual descriptors.
The charade goes on so long as the Left is in a revolutionary condition; that is, surviving on the energy of the system is bringing down. Lenin promised to hang his enemies by their own rope. He forgot to add that after he had taken over they would no longer know how to make rope. When the parasite has finally finished feasting on its host, it too dies of starvation.
People like Germaine Greer require their "Western oppressor" to keep their gigs going. Where would they get the free energy otherwise. Once the vaporware company stops getting payments from its dupes to write nonexistent software, it too goes out of business.
That's why, for example, you always hear demands from European human rights advocates for America to "clean up" Darfur. You would think they could clean it up themselves. Similarly they never tire of asking America to "clean up the world". If they were so clever, they could clean it up themselves. At every stage the "future software" solution they offer is always described as superior to to the existing. Ask them to produce it and they will ask you for another check.
I wish I could describe something that was logically self-consistent; but that's the sad thing about the Left. It's so grand on the outside and really nothing but dust and cobwebs on the inside.
The desire among Left activists to bring about sweeping social change leads naturally to a number of "habits of the mind."
Excesses in the critique of current societal arrangements. The amplification of society's failures and down playing society's accomplishments will convince people to "let go" and support your crusade. The bird in the hand is rotten so go for the birds in the bush. This becomes lefty's world view.
A lack of analysis of proposed changes. Analysis will turn up potential faults and shortcomings that will only discourage you and turn off potential converts. Rose colored glasses are required. Damn the unintended consequences, full speed ahead!
A willingness to embrace any disgruntled group in the near term as allies. A need for allies requires the activist to not be picky about what other groups hope to accomplish long term. Criticism will only cause schisms. The Secret Police can sort it out after you come to power. The revolution's children are always on the menu.
Multiculturalism helps with all three. While saying we should appreciate all cultures, it's actually about running the West down while changing the perception of other cultures -- not just to "as good as the West" but to "better than." Thus you bring your own culture down while pointing out what makes other cultures superior (It Takes a Village, says Hillary). You can also make stuff up, ala Margret Meade and the sexual practices in Samoa (No one has yet found the Island she wrote of, but every fourteen year old boy would like to).
The activist thus demonstrates a sympathy (often false) for out groups to bring them into their "United for Social Justice" front and help the Left achieve power.
Wretchard, you mistake what Feminists really want, as opposed to their rhetoric (leftists too).
What feminists want, is to be the dowager empress in a caste-ridden, nobility-oriented society. Inherited position and wealth, and using sex to achieve both. This is why most feminists are descended from the wealthy.
Leftists too want nothing more than an inherited nobility system. The revolutionary committees are always nothing more than a naked attempt to create new nobility. Not for nothing was Che the wealthy pampered son who wished to run things himself. And found expression of power through killing people.
Hitchens has with some justice, criticized religions for being just what I have called the Left, a kind of "vaporware". Whether we are talking about the suicide bomber or the Stakhanovite suicide workers, the essential demand is the same: more inputs for an indescribably beautiful future. But misery, indifference and darkness in the meantime. Yet what if the promised future never comes and the 72 Virgins have the same degree of reality as the Worker's Paradise?
That's why the hallmark of any true religion, political philsophy or software product for that matter, is not necessarily perfection but a positive product in the here and now. When Pope Benedict described the Byzantine Emperor Paleologus' conviction that God must always be comprehensible in terms of human goodness and reason he was expressing this very thought. That the truly divine must leave a faint shadow of goodness upon the world. That the Redeemer must suffer the little children to come unto him; not send them across a minefield to clear a path; that the real Redeemer should die for our sins; not order us kill for the spread of his name. For unless He brought a little heaven to earth, what would we have but vaporware? What would he be but a father of lies?
Another point!
I preferred the left when it was peddling utopia. When they came to power you could always say: are we there yet? Halfway? A quarter? Hmm? And of course the train has not left the station and has run out of food and fuel.
So now they say: Capitalism will take you to the lowest circle of hell! We, on the other hand, will take you to Hell -- Level Five!
Hearing this, no one is in a hurry to get there. No one will impatiently ask -- "are we halfway to hell yet?" Instead, We'll say "hey, no rush."
This discussion goes back to those debates over whether organizing for "small improvements in the life of the masses" was "counter-revolutionary" or whether it was permissible to simply empower people without subsuming them under the "united front" itself subordinate to the "vanguard of proletariat". I don't suppose many persons have heard the words "anarchist reformist wrecker" spoken as a sentence of death; but believe me, over such little things were executions ordered.
But ultimately there are only two crimes in the Left; apostasy and schism. All the rest is flanelling. I think anyone who has repudiated the real Left -- not the cafe variety -- but the the serious kind will remember it as a kind of madhouse. It is exactly the sort of place, perhaps the only sort of place, where absurdities like supporting Islamists to advance tolerance and urging people not to breathe in order to save the earth can be accepted without medication. Some of my friends felt the infallible litmus test for detecting -- and rapidly escaping from -- a True Believer was whether he could laugh. Seriously.
A good friend of mine recalled one night in a safe house or some such when the guy in the opposite bunk became convulsed with laughter. He asked after the reason when the fellow had settled down long enough to talk.
"I remember making a pilgrimage to Mao Tse Tung's boyhood home under the sponsorship of the China Friendship association and, upon finding the pond where Mao had waded as a boy, immersed myself in it and drank the waters."
"And?"
"My Chinese guides thought I was crazy. And I've just realized they were right."
Anybody who can truly laugh at himself and his political beliefs is probably a good man to have at your side. The next time you come across one of these fanatical whatchamacallits beware the ones who are holding themselves together so hard you're worried they might have a heart attack.
The real test of faith is to understand that you're not in control and look forward to life anyway.
Quoting Jeff Burton: I know you are fond of programming analogies. What the best metaphor here? There's a bug in the left's software.
Heh. Believe it or not, there is a type of programming design flaw called a race condition, and it just might fit: "a flaw in a system or process whereby the output and/or result of the process is unexpectedly and critically dependent on the sequence or timing of other events. The term originates with the idea of two signals racing each other to influence the output first...Race conditions arise in software when separate processes or threads of execution depend on some shared state."
Interestingly enough, "race conditions" are often the source of software security vulnerabilities which can compromise an entire system.
My point is: Don't think of the GGs of the world as unable to see the truth. They see the truth, have seen it for a long time, and dismissed it because it does not conform to their larger agenda.
As if anyone can dismiss the truth without suffering enormous philosophical and psychological penalties but that is exactly the point being made.
Superb analysis and dissection, aslam.
They will abide any evil if it is in service of the larger agenda. And they have come to believe that because they can run circles around lesser truth seekers, that they are smarter. And that that makes them right.
Even geniuses sometimes stumble. The Left makes it into such a habit that their ineptness has become tiresome at best.
hdgreene: While saying we should appreciate all cultures, it's actually about running the West down while changing the perception of other cultures -- not just to "as good as the West" but to "better than."
This is the tragi-comic concept of Rosseau's "Noble Savage" brought to its logical extension. As if returning to a time predating indoor plumbing, antibiotics, sterile operating procedures and the scientific method would find us in a world of Edenic wilderness. The Left's idolization of Third World primitiveness as some sort of authentic cultural "purity" embodies their self-loathing and rejection of modern progress that threatens all of modern civilization.
Excellent commentary, all. Refreshing, to say the least.
biff: Interestingly enough, "race conditions" are often the source of software security vulnerabilities which can compromise an entire system.
Didn't this more advanced state change problem originate in the old "uncertainty" condititions of primitive logic gate structures?
There is another possible reason for Greer's desire to focus on solving "our" problem here. If she went to Darfur and started badgering people about rape or honor killings, she might end up in prison with crowds chanting - literally - for her head. In the US or Western Europe, she can badger, hector, and slur as much as she likes and suffer nothing worse than an invitation to appear on The View.
Yeah, these new leftists seem pretty pathetic compared to the ones that came before. I don't have much good to say about Fidel Castro, but at least he opposed an actual dictator who would shoot back and not an open democracy that would willing give him a soapbox and tell everyone to let him speak his piece.
Turn the channel off.
Stop patronizing the NYT, and rest of the long list of pernicious media that's in bed with the Commie and Jihadi enemy.
These deadly parasites know full well what they are and what they're doing. Keep them in the sandbox, in a deserted island, and may the great ocean have its way with them.
Blather, there is no problem in Darfur, or NATO could find 24 helicopters for the UN mission.
Then again, NATO cannot find find helicopters for the mission in Afghanistan.
NATO, including the USA, is as bad as Germaine Greer, when it comes to being disingenuous about Darfur.
The problem in Darfur is not with finding 24 copters. The problem with Darfur is not even in Darfur. Fixing Darfur equates to Regime Change in the Sudan. And no one wants to cause Regime Change there. Most countries are utterly opposed to regime change – or claim to be. The one country that is not opposed to the concept – the USA – has no interest in doing it unless there are compelling national security reasons to do so – and because of – or perhaps despite – our experience in Iraq, maybe not even then.
The Pottery Barn rule would apply to Darfur – it might not in Iran – but it would have to in Darfur because that IS THE PURPOSE FOR GOING THERE. Decapitating the government and destroying their military and then walking out would only make things worse – every town in the whole country would become a Darfur.
And as we found out in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pottery Barn rule is damn hard to apply when everything in the crappy little store already was broken before you got there.
I think that a generation or two ago, GErmaine Greer and Helen Thomas shared a common relative. Greer has been exhibiting the same "crazy aunt in the attic" world view as Helen for some years now, and should henceforth be given the same amount of respect and time as Ms. Thomas currently receives.
Just because you're an aging woman does *not* mean you're wise.
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Re: Darfur/Sudan
All it would take is an airlift of some light weapons to the Christians/African rebels and keeping the sky clear of Islamist "government" elements. Ethnic cleansing should be allowed to work both ways. And if the Saudis protest, they need to be told to fsck off.
If you look at Germaine Greer with say, Mark Twain (Connecticut Yankee, Innocents Abroad) or Anatole France (Penguin Island) there is a huge disconnect. Almost as if there were alien cultures.
The 19th Century Liberal/Leftists despised tradition, including native ones, nobility-peasantry hierarchies, superstition, and noble-savage romanticism. They wanted a world of science, flat social orders, egalitarianism, and constant material advancement.
For a man like Twain, who lost several children to childhood diseases, modern medicine did not come soon enough.
It's quite fascinating, to see how debased into nobility-seeking people like Greer have come.
The Perspicacious Wretchard: "Or is it just some kind of post-modern pseudocode you must on no account ever try to compile?
More and more, Multiculti Leftism looks like a form of mental illness. It's delusional and suicidal and schizophrenic.
A computer program can in theory be debugged and made to run correctly.
This on the other hand needs to be put in a straight-jacket, locked up to prevent it from harming others, and keep on regular doses of Chlorpromazine.
Nahncee:
Have you ever read “Who Stole Feminism?” by Christina Hoff Sommers? She points out that there are two very different kind of feminists today. The Equity Feminists came first, with the message that woman should be allowed to try to succeed in “the man’s world.” The other, more “modern” feminists and the ones that attract the most attention today are the Gender Feminists, who argue that woman are oppressed in the male dominated world.
The Equity Feminists argue for the importance of the human being; their feminism derives from the fact that women are human beings, just like everyone else.
The Gender Feminists argue for the importance of the female viewpoint in a male-dominated world. They use the moral authority that formed the basis for the Equity Feminists arguments as their own, but in reality do not embrace the basic idea. Greer even is offered as an example of modern feminism in the book.
While she might object to the choice of words, Christian Sommers very likely would not object to the basic concept behind Rush Limbaugh’s term “FeminiNazis.”
I think that the author has uncovered a basic truth behind not just feminism but the entire current day civil rights movement: It has “progressed” from “Equity” to “The Primacy of Our Viewpoint.” It wraps itself in the moral authority of the Equity argument but in fact promotes that which is the very opposite.
Have you ever read “Who Stole Feminism?” by Christina Hoff Sommers?
RWE, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around Jane Fonda calling Hillary, "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina."
If I were going to have guessed, I would have thought that La Jane would have been a flag carrier for Mrs. Bill Clinton. I guess if you're the ex-Mrs. Roger Vadim, the ex-Mrs. Tom Hayden, and the ex-Mrs. Ted Turner, you don't need no damned philanderin' husband to make your way in the world, and look down upon a female who *has* achieved whatever success she has riding on her husband's coat-tails.
Interesting that Oprah is also snubbing Mrs. Bill -- I wonder if for the same reasons.
In response to your example, I'll bet that Mrs. Bill Clinton is more of a Germaine Greer feminist than an Equity one.
Hillary Clinton is not a feminist. Otherwise she would have dumped Bill - or shot him - a long time ago.
She is a Hillaryist. She is in it for herself, and no one and nothing else.
She and her husband represent the Ultimate Liberal: One who is so self-pliable they will not even admit that Liberalism is their philosophy. I.e., Moral relativism taken to its ultimate end.
Hanoi Jane is the Real Deal: a Radical Communist/Equity Feminist. She knows a fake when she sees one.
We prefer to call her Jihad Jane now that she's being sympathetic to the Arab terrorists.
Is Oprah a feminist?
So, Germaine Greer opened her mouth and demonstrated she is a snivelling cur. What else is new?
RWE: Hillary Clinton is not a feminist. Otherwise she would have dumped Bill - or shot him - a long time ago.
No, that's what Rudy and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich do. Devout Methodists believe in forgiveness and in trying to make the marriage work.
Hillary IS a feminist. Married an Alpha Male who has sex with lots of other women (if other women want him, he MUST be worthwhile!). Uses her position as the wife of Alpha Male to act as unelected co-president. That's the check list for feminism.
And that's without the Huma Abedin rumors being true. Achieving power through any means possible as Queen Bee is what feminism is all about. If the rumors are true, even better. A classic example of feminism in all it's glory.
The tricky part for feminists as whether to support or oppose the abuse of women in the Islamic world is in regards how either stance will aid or hinder feminist interests in that part of the world; that is to say, how either stance will affect the power and prestige of the Marxists.
Our problem with understanding this dynamic is due in part to a common misconception, that feminists in some way or other are interested in the rights of women. Outside of propaganda or image considerations, this simply is not the case. Feminists are instead interested in the rights and privileges of feminists, something entirely different. Like the rest of the Marxist Left, ideology is simply a cover for power-mongering, avarice and greed. Since Leftists think of the general public as "the masses", cattle, or some other similarly denigrating metaphor, it is perfectly within their sense of personal justification to lie, cheat, steal and kill, with considerable prejudice, to achieve whatever they have decided will best serve to achieve their personal goals - indeed, they have made a bloodbath of the 20th century towards such ends. It should be no wonder that they might feel obliged to extend the same courtesy of carte blanche brutality to their allies of the moment.
Leftists are not bereft of reason. They are absent of moral considerations. That Leftists in power invariably establish social dystopian abominations is not a sign of failure, nor of "errors" or "mistakes" in application, but instead of considerable and intentional success, in that such arrangements always profit individual (surviving) Leftists handsomely. Such behavior is no more a process of irrationality or error than what pirates do to the crews of merchant ships.
Insofar as feminists feel they stand to profit from aiding Muslim extremists against the West, they will do so, using the most duplicitous of arguments to justify their behavior. If hundreds or thousands of women are enslaved, raped, mutilated and/or killed in the process, feminists will not be moved one iota - so long as the political or economic interests of feminists are aided and not harmed in the process.
Related.
Whiskey_199: And that's without the Huma Abedin rumors being true. Achieving power through any means possible as Queen Bee is what feminism is all about. If the rumors are true, even better. A classic example of feminism in all it's glory.
There are identical rumors about Condi. It seems any woman who obtains power is going to face this sort of accusation. But then again, it is Satan's job to accuse the people of God.
dr. ferris: Feminists are instead interested in the rights and privileges of feminists, something entirely different.
Now that's going to leave a mark!
Great overall analysis, doc!
teresita: It seems any woman who obtains power is going to face this sort of accusation. But then again, it is Satan's job to accuse the people of God.
Describing Hillary as being one of "the people of God", really pushes the envelope of credibility. Hillary is one of the most elitist, grasping and ruthless pseudo-communists to come down the pike for some time.
Dr. Ferris
..."errors" or "mistakes" in application...
Don't under-estimate the usage of errors or mistakes "in application" by the dictators and their leftist enablers.
That way it ("the revolution" and its myth) can go on forever. That way the dictators can consolidate their absolute power by "removing the traitors who made mistakes".
And most importantly they don't need to improve the lives of their subjects.
Nahncee,
Oprah may claimed the 'race' card before the 'gender' card. Maybe she's totally fooled by the "hope" represented by Obama, and entirely tired of the Clintons. Feminism is not the only game around.
I wonder who is Fonda's candidate.
Jeff Burton,
The left's software doesn't even compile anymore.
Dr Ferris,
"feminists as whether to support or oppose the abuse of women in the Islamic world is in regards how either stance will aid or hinder feminist interests in that part of the world"
The problem is how the issue at hand will politically, locally affect the feminists. In this particular interest, speaking out against Islamic practices would be in general agreement with Pres Bush. That overpowers any actual feminist value that a particular stance might carry.
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