Nah. Don’t tell a thing.

You women are pretty on top of it.

Not.

To the extent that the struggle for women’s emancipation, since that is what we are discussing, becomes politically dependent upon and determined by ruling political parties or bodies of armed men, the less satisfactory or meaningful the outcome. The history of second wave feminism in the “developedâ€? world also illustrates that completely.

Despite initial progress and raised expectations, the gender wage gap for full time women workers in Australia is as bad now as it was in 1978. Subsequent social democratic governments made some progress for a short period, but we are now going backwards. The stats on violence against women over this period too show an increasing inability of the state to give support to the growing numbers of women and children in need. See the latest stats from NSW: 1 in 2 women with children who apply for emergency housing currently are turned away and I doubt these stats include the vast numbers of Aboriginal women in need.

The absence of a strong, visible, vocal, independent women’s movement, its fragmentation and demoralisation and lack of replenishment, in the face of a system that really cares not a jot for them as human beings, has reaped the whirlwind we now contemplate. Things can only get worse for the majority of women.

As far as Afghanistan goes, the self-organisation of women there in the past decade has a lot to do with the international attention given to their successful efforts to at least highlight and challenge their ongoing, profound, heartbreaking oppression.

I have, and your point is?

Amused, Razor’s point in linking to that article is that because he rarely actually reads the posts here, particularly not those by women, and particularly particularly not those by thoughtful and intelligent women who take complex and nuanced positions on these vexed and wretched matters, he thinks, quite wrongly, that we all need converting.

Preumably he also thinks we are those very same nasty girls who got Phyllis Chesler’s panties in a bunch by not inviting her to parties.

Jack, if your g-f is as doting as all that, perhaps after she’s brought your pipe and slippers you could get her to look up ‘chortling’ for you.

And I’d add amused, that Jack seems quite unable to grasp the fact that pointing out fallacies in his arguements is not the same thing as supporting whatever he is arguing against.

Thats rich, coming from a world class straw-man fabricator such as yourself. I would be interested in applying logical validation tests on the fallacies that you claim sprout, like mushrooms after spring rain, from my arguments. But so far these spectres remain as flighty and vapid as you.

Gossip-tattling, bait-switching and falsehood-spreading are not the high methodological road to positive truth.

You fancy yourself as Enlightened but you align yourself with partisans whose cultural policies promote anything but.

[And with that he, face chortling with rage, storms off-stage to a therapeutic G&T fixed by doting g-f.]

Yes, it bothers me that women under the Taliban were so oppressed. But somehow I have a hard time believing that the best thing for them is killing those women, their sons and daughters, their brothers and husbands. Liberating women by waging war is like curing a paper cut by cutting off the finger.

Life as an impoversihed widow in a warzone may not be the vast improvement some are imagining the Western occupation to be creating.

Boy howdy! Meantime I’ve been awake for I believe about 72 hours continuously at this point, guiding a particularly rare species of tugboat in through the narrows. Heeeee-whack!

“Now I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold, too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.
And don’t worry about your lineage,
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra,
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.”

– Frank O’Hara, from “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”

Thank you for telling me that I wrote something I didn’t write. You have proved my point for me. Your so called ‘views’ are nothing more than smear and innuendo.

No, I merely performed a reductio ad absurdum on your ridiculous analogy. A lesson in the logic of ideological polarites in the Culture War is indicated.

The Cultural Leftists (CLs) are sometimes called Wets, small “l” liberals or luvvies or constructivists. They tend to sympathise with individual autonomies
“vibrantly blossoming” amongst diversified minorities.

These folk are clearly and invariably in opposition to Cultural Rightist (CR’s) who are sometimes called Drys, small “c” conservatives or maybe ultras. In a stable democracy the CR’s tend to be apologists for the institutional authority established by a fairly unified majority.

The CRs are obviously critical of the CLs values. Just as the CL’s are critical of the CRs power. That is the essence of the Culture War.

You state that CR’s are somehow “the 21st century equivalent of the 1930s kulturkampf against ‘rootless cosmopolitans and effete intellectuals’”. So it is fair to infer your position is that conservative CR’s are anti-semitic crypto-Nazis. This is a violation of Godwins Law, automatic loss of argument.

amused says:

Where is your evidence that members of the RSL are what you term ‘cultural conservatives’?

My own lyin’ eyes are always a good place to start. But wikipedia. It characterises the RSL as “politically conservative, Anglophilic, and monarchist”. Yet it is also indisputedly anti-Nazi. Therefore your attempt to smear cultural conservatives CR’s as crypto-Nazis blows up in your face.

Read it.

But enough yacking. It’s a beautiful sunny Indian summer POETS Day in Melbourne and I’m outta here.

The same term in Google Scholar.

How about, for example, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Ms Magazine (which has had several good articles about the plight of women in the Middle East), Bust magazine with a rather critical analysis of women in the West choosing to become Muslims, how about the mention of Women Against Fundamentalism in Iran on an Oz feminist e-chat list just the other day, how about the many Muslims feminists who are more than capable of speaking for themselves (put feminism Islam Wikipedia into your search engine). How about actually talking to a Muslim woman?

Yeah, but *after* the fighting, they made utterly spectacular slaves, right?

Where is your evidence that members of the RSL are what you term ‘cultural conservatives’? Which RSL members? All of them? Some of them? Your friends?

The men (and women) who fought in WW2, the Korean and the Vietnam wars, were responsible in large part, for the increase in democracy that I support and you oppose so sneeringly. Those people included both my father and my grandfather. Both of them would have despised your fake and phony pose as the defender of the values they fought for, and both supported movements for greater personal and political freedom for everybody, not just for old men like themselves.

It never ceases to amaze me that you and others like you are so big on what everybody thinks, but so unable to provide any evidence whatsoever for the ‘majority’ status of the opinions of which you approve, and the allegedly ‘leftist’ nature of the opinions you are hostile towards. You and others like you are hostile toward genuine democracy, and in favour of rule by an elite comprising people who share your dour, pessimistic, and fundamentally anti democratic assumptions about people and social possibilities. You are entitled to your opinion, but you should not feel entitled to deal dishonestly and corruptly with the views of those who disagree with you, and expect to be taken seriously as a committed liberal democrat, valiantly defending democracy.

The term ‘cultural left’ is a rhetorical device that gestures towards a politics of smear and defamation in pursuit of authoritarian politics at home, and militarism abroad. It is the 21st century equivalent of the 1930s kulturkampf against ‘rootless cosmopolitans and effete intellectuals’ that proved so effective (for a time) in restoring the good old status quo ante, of the brutish middle ages.

Why dont you come right out and say it: cultural conservatives want to ressurect the Third Reich. Thats why you find so many of them in the RSL.

How about, just for once, providing some evidence about what the “Cultural Left� have been doing, Jack?

Its what they have not been doing abroad: hoodwinking the Afghanistan Hawks. The be-luvvy-duvved UN forces have been as useless as tits on a bull in that beleaguered nation. A bit more solidarity with the liberation forces might have helped.

And what they have been doing at home: post-modernist bed Wetters have fouled our nest with their embrace of reactionary tribalism. But I don’t need to provide anymore evidence on that score Kim, since thats where you live.

Although this group of Cultural Drys seems to have a very long record in support of Afghan women.

They and whose army?

the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act was non-partisan. The “Cultural Left� just as much as anybody else, supported it.

Want to try again?

Sure, although for humanitarian reasons I would prefer not. Mugs like you seem to not know when you are beat.

The Afghan Women and Children Relief Act was a piece of US legislation, passed by the hated Bush-admin.

The Act would have been so much hot air (a speciality of the Wets) had the US military not enforced it with the barrell of a gun. This would be the same military, which that cops nothing but crap from the Cultural Left. Covenants without the sword…etc

Let me refresh your memory [said with sinister menace]. THe record shows that “peacenik Cultural Leftists” were often strongly opposed to the Operation Enduring Freedom, right the way round the world. Before you entirely purge your memory hole you might want to take a gander at this.

Cultural Leftists, both inside and outside core CoW states, were certainly not effective supporters of the Afghan war. Before the war the most of the chattering classes spent their critical energies apprehending the public about the “dreaded Afghan winter”. After the war they spent most of their critical energies exaggerating occasional US atrocities.

Care to lead with your jaw again?