Wham!
Open Thread – Tues 8 May 2023
- Open Thread – Weekend 27 April 2024
- Nuclear power and the foundational lie
- Open Thread – Anzac Day 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 22 April 2024
- Open Thread – Weekend 21 April 2024
This thread dedicated to Peaky Blinders hats and sixty-year-old jokes presented as new.
BAM!
New OT up.
JC April 26, 2024 11:58 pm Best news of the week, month even Atlassian Corporation175.12. -11.74%Down almost 12% I agree. Hopefully,…
Firstly, Pesutto wasn’t Deeming’s boss. He enjoyed that position with her party room vote. Secondly, you can’t call a colleague a ‘Nazi’, lie about retracting that statement in an agreement, and expect to enjoy the continued support of that colleague.
I’ve been trolling superannuated teachers on Haute Crapper re Joe Biden. They really think Trump is “just as bad” and if Biden goes to gaol, well our “kid” gets “expelled” too.
Also, the business expertise the Bidens have is well, business expertise.
Grandpa Ed Simpson still shilling for leftard causes.
Kartiya are like Toyotas
White workers on Australia’s cultural frontier – 3 pages of 17 Page PDF
Kim Mahood
‘Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.’
– remark by a Western Desert woman about whitefellas who work in Indigenous communities
UNLIKE the broken Toyotas, which are abandoned where they fall, cannibalised,
overturned, gutted and torched, the broken kartiya go away – albeit often feeling
they have been cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched. They leave behind
them dying gardens and unfinished projects, misunderstandings and misplaced
good intentions. The best leave foundations on which their replacements can build
provisional shelters while they scout the terrain, while the worst leave funds
unaccounted for, relationships in ruins and communities in chaos.
There are many reasons why kartiya break down. Some break themselves,
bringing with them baggage lugged from other lives, investing in the people they’ve
come to help qualities that are projections of their own anxieties and ideals. Eager
and needy, they are prime material for white slavery, rushing to meet demands that
increase in direct proportion to their willingness to respond to them. They create a
legacy of expectation and dependency, coupled with one of failure and
disappointment.
A more common cause of breakdown is the impossibility of carrying out the
work you are expected to do. Two factors in particular are not included in any job
description. The first is that if the work involves interaction with Aboriginal people,
which is usually the case, this interaction will be so constant and demanding that
there will be no time left to carry out the required tasks. The second is that by default
the kartiya’s function is to be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Blaming the
kartiya is the lubricant that smooths the volatile frictions of community life. For
someone of robust temperament and sound self-??esteem this is irritating but
manageable. If you have an overheated sense of responsibility or a tendency
towards self-??blame it’s an opportunity to experience the high point of personal
failure.
SINCE THE REVELATIONS about child sexual abuse in remote Indigenous
communities scorched the national consciousness a few years ago, conditions in
remote communities and towns have been back in the public eye. The flaws and
failures of self-??determination have been exposed, and it has become possible to
speak aloud truths that until recently would have seen the speaker branded a racist,
and his or her voice neutralised. That some of the most articulate and influential
voices are Aboriginal has made it possible for the private conversations many
people have been having for years to enter the public domain.
There is, however, one story that doesn’t get much mileage: remote Indigenous
Australia has a significant white population that is disproportionately influential
while being unequipped, unprepared or unsuitable for the work it does. There are the
good people, who are overworked and undervalued; and there are the sociopaths, the
borderline criminals, the self-??righteous bullies and the mentally unhinged, who
gravitate to the positions no one else wants, entrench themselves and contribute in no
small degree to the malaise that haunts Indigenous communities.
It is mandatory for anyone wishing to work in Antarctica to undergo a physical
and psychological assessment to establish whether they will stand up to the stresses of
isolation, the extreme environment and the intense proximity to other people. All the
same factors exist in remote Aboriginal communities, along with confronting cross-??
cultural conditions. Yet there don’t appear to be any recognised training programs for
people who aspire to work in a community, or screening criteria to weed out the mad,
bad and incompetent who prowl the grey zone of Indigenous service delivery. The
remote community is a kind of parallel universe, where career paths, if they exist at
all, travel laterally or downwards. The famous quip about mercenaries, missionaries
and misfits has a lot of truth in it, and each type covers a spectrum, from highly
functional through incompetent to downright destructive. Under pressure, both
strengths and weaknesses become exaggerated, and what, in normal circumstances
would be merely a character trait (stubborn, orderly, conscientious, volatile, flexible,
timid) can become the quality that makes or breaks you.
This desert culture, where the power of family and country encompasses and
transcends all other preoccupations, is where the crossed purposes of Indigenous
and non-??Indigenous expectations are at their most extreme. It’s probably the zone of
greatest discomfort in Australia, a place where the white noise of the kartiya world
and the Babel of Aboriginal voices create a static through which we blunder,
grinning and waving like mad people, signalling that we mean each other no harm,
though harm frequently occurs
The contradiction at the heart of the story is that for the quality of desert
Aboriginal lives to improve in the terms demanded by humanitarian standards – in
health, education, housing and the like – the people themselves must become more
like us, and to become more like us requires them to relinquish the identity from
which their resilience and sense of self is drawn. Without their Aboriginal identity
they are reduced to society’s dross: the poorest, the least employable, the shortest
lived, the least literate, the substance abusers and losers and wife bashers. And one
of the most powerful ways in which they keep hold of that identity is by defining it
against white people.
Among the older people, holding onto traditional culture is the force in which
they believe, but the young are like the young in every culture. They don’t listen to
us, the old people complain, while the young people move in flocks, plugged into
iPods and clutching mobile phones, trying whatever drug is available, dreaming of
becoming rock stars and film stars and sports stars, using sex as an antidote to
boredom. The cultural structures are still there, in skin names, family relationships,
identification with country. But they are loosening all the time, as the fine tough
threads of high knowledge are wearing out, leaving behind a shadow knowledge
that carries the fear of punishment without the protocols and understanding with
which to manage it.
Against all this uncertainty, this great loose mutating cosmology, the kartiya are
conspicuous and ubiquitous, busy, bossy, cranky, frequently behaving badly. They
are running the schools and the offices, the clinics, the stores, the art centres, the
police stations. They are the service providers and project co-??ordinators. They
control the money and make the rules. They live in fenced compounds with their
pay cheques and cars and the choice to stay or go. They exacerbate, simply by being
there, the antithesis of themselves.
There is, for the time being, no alternative. Kinship pressures make it almost
impossible for an Aboriginal person to sustain a management position, and the few
who take on such a role are subject to constant demands, and abuse if they refuse to
comply. The mobility of people means that skills training is intermittent and
commitment to work is provisional. Take the kartiya out of the picture and the Big
Men, the powerbrokers, will fill the gap. This is not unique to desert Aboriginal
society. It has happened in every place where a colonial power has abdicated
without leaving a self-??sustaining system in place.
FOR THE NEWLY arrived kartiya, bright-??eyed and full of enthusiasm, the initial
welcome is gratifying. She is thrilled to be taken in hand by one or more Aboriginal
people who are friendly and knowledgeable, and is moved almost to tears when she
is awarded a skin name.
Clip from DarkHorse Podcast Livestream
Something is on the march and it has revealed itself
Megyn Kelly on How Trump “Won the Night” During the CNN Town Hall That “Pleased No one”
Glimpses of Life in a Remote Aboriginal Community
When I recently came across Kim Mahood’s searingly frank description of whitefella workers in remote Aboriginal communities, I was swept back in a wave of nostalgia to my own brief exposure in Arnhem Land almost 30 years ago. While I didn’t keep a record, and my three visits there amounted only to about a month in total, the impressions gained were powerful enough to have survived all this time, with only some of the detail (including names of most of the key players) now lost.
A few days later we were driven a few kilometres across to the south-eastern corner of the island to meet the cargo barge, on its routine run along the coast from Darwin, which visited every three weeks to deliver essential supplies. It seemed half the community was there, waiting on the beach as the vessel chugged up the passage to drop its front ramp on the sand.
The whitefella crew most efficiently forklifted off pallets of 200 litre fuel drums, plus produce that included cartons of Coca Cola, potato chips, Twisties, Mars Bars, Kellogg’s Coco Pops and Fruit Loops, as well as large parcels and odd bits of equipment. The unloading was all over quickly, and the barge headed off to its next stop, a day or so away. Again, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the local people, especially the kids, had any idea of where all this stuff came from, how it might have been produced.
On the drive back to “town”, I asked about a burnt out, late-model Toyota Land Cruiser sitting on a bush track about 100 m off the main road. It was explained that, a few barge visits back, this new vehicle had been delivered to its proud, local owner, who gathered a bunch of mates for a trip to their outstation. Sadly, he hadn’t thought to fill the tank, and so it came to a halt shortly after they set off. He’d left the vehicle there overnight, returning the following morning to find it had been set alight by a bunch of kids.
I couldn’t ascertain if there were any consequences (it seemed no one was too bothered about it), but also couldn’t help wondering what all those people involved might have known of the origins of such machinery and the money that pays for it.
Perhaps the kids had seen burning cars in some of their movies? In my mind, “easy come, easy go” was emerging as the operating principle regarding much communal life here.
Shortly after the picture of the island water tower (below) was taken, some young boys climbed up there for a swim, and thoughtfully crapped into the water. The system had to be shut down, awaiting arrival of engineers from Darwin to drain reservoir tanks and sterilise the system. This was overkill, in my view – those kids wouldn’t have had anything in their excrement that was alien to the locals. But it did show concern by administrators, plus made a lot of contractor money for some industrious tradies.
Another conspicuous feature on the outskirts of town was a quarter-acre compound, enclosed in a high, chain-link fence (topped with barbed wire) and holding new-looking trucks, bulldozers, excavators, graders etc.
My expression of pleasant surprise was met with the response that this wasn’t the well-equipped council depot I’d assumed, but a scrapyard! Apparently, there were no locals who could fix any machines that broke down, and it was too expensive and difficult to bring out mechanics, so the equipment was simply left to rot.
I couldn’t help imagining how any keen entrepreneur could easily fix and capitalise on this treasure trove of heavy equipment. No doubt the administrative obstacles would be mind-boggling.
Next, we had to fuel up our vehicle. The only “service station” was a metal shed holding several drums of diesel fuel, one of which was fitted with a metered hand-pump. An exercise book and pencil on a string were hanging off the wall, for drivers to record their usage. I noted the last entry had been a few weeks previously, and was told that, as soon as one driver failed to account for his consumption, that triggered others to do likewise. The council, which purchased the fuel drums, regularly threatened to shut down the station if the practice continued, but to little avail. Did the drivers ever wonder where their fuel came from, and who paid for it, or did they just accept it as a free gift, another “basic human right”?
A visit to the local store, managed by a whitefella, revealed the same range of goods we’d watched being offloaded from the barge, with plenty of sugary drinks, lollies, ice-cream, sweet biscuits, long-life cakes, sausages and minced meat, white flour, white rice, and refined sugar, but almost no fresh vegetable or fruits (and what was there looked very tired). The last items were understandable for such a remote location, but the manager did say that when he made an effort to boost the supply of heavily-subsidised fresh greens and fruit, the customer response was poor, despite initial expressions of enthusiasm, so that most had to be dumped.
An enterprising local had set up a hot, roast chicken booth nearby, and I watched as a child of maybe 6-8 years paid for a bagged chicken with a $50 note, trotting happily off without collecting any change.
During the mission era, apparently the community was almost self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables, produced in its own thriving gardens and orchards, but once the missionaries were sent packing, this all fell apart.
Zipster:
Still refusing to take responsibility for the disaster he’s unleashed on the company he worked for.
He’ll be next for the chopping block.
“One of the Not Adverse Effects these workers experience is that their children are all girls.
Care to comment on that?”
Sure.
I personally know quite a lot of people so exposed – dozens first hand, and hundreds as friends of friends.
Many have sons – about the same as you see with people who are not so exposed.
And grandchildren also in the approximate same sex ratios as you would otherwise expect.
That is: some families have a “run” of boys, others of girls, and some are more or less evenly split. If you know the family history, you can often take a good guess at the sex a child will be.
Wadeye: Failed State as Cultural Triumph
1st July 2022
Patrick McCauley
The politically expedient and prideful apology from Kevin Rudd to all Aboriginal people on behalf of all Australians angered me. That it was so popular drove me to despair. I cannot shake off the feeling that this current fad amongst left-wing governments (even the Vatican) to apologise for past wrongs is really scraping the very bottom of the “spin” barrel and is in fact a form of political arrogance that will do more to exacerbate past tragedies than to redress them. The inimitable Theodore Dalrymple suggests:
…official apologies for distant events, however important or pregnant with consequences those events may have been … have bad effects on both those who give them and those who receive them.
The effect on the givers is the creation of a state of spiritual pride. Insofar as the person offering the apology is doing what no one has done before him, he is likely to consider himself the moral superior of his predecessors. He alone has had the moral insight and courage to apologise.
On the other hand, he knows full well that he has absolutely no personal moral responsibility for whatever it is that he is apologising for. In other words, his apology brings him all kudos and no pain.
Plato defined love as the “desire for the perpetual possession of the good”. The classical Greek thinkers disapproved of compassion—they saw it as a type of pity and doubted its reasonableness and therefore its justice. Nietzsche declared that human beings wallow in pity as swine do in mud—that their pity for others was indistinguishable from their pity for themselves and that they must master their compassion in the name of higher considerations. Perversely, it is the left side of politics that has defined a dreadful orthodoxy based on “the good” as compassion and human rights (equality, equity, positive discrimination, affirmative action, social justice, global ethics) together with a deep and pervasive hatred of the world of civilisation and of men.
We are now expected to hate ourselves, our country and Western democracies in general, in order to be considered intelligent and humane beings. In order to love Aboriginal people, we must hate Australia, its history, and Australians.
For me, just emerging from two decades of the abuse and discrimination meted out by the Family Law Act, Rudd’s maternalistic apology became a nemesis in a life decimated by this left-wing orthodoxy based on compassion. I had spent several years working with Aboriginal people back in the Seventies before my futile attempts at love under the domestic matriarchy, and so I decided to take a teaching position at the isolated Aboriginal community of Wadeye in the Northern Territory, to see first-hand how the Rousseau-inspired Coombsian theories had played out in reality.
In 2008, long before Wadeye’s current troubles saw hundreds flee their homes and feuds conducted with crossbows and machetes, Patrick McCauley reported for Quadrant on his experience as a teacher in the community. Things were bad then. They are much worse today
Wadeye has a population of about 2500 in its general vicinity. The main settlement has an airstrip, a Catholic school, a swimming pool, a Catholic church, a store, an art centre, a museum, a post office, municipal offices, a mechanics shop, locked petrol bowsers ($2.60 per litre) and a Centrelink office. The main street is surrounded by about a square kilometre of solidly-built kit-type houses in various states of repair. Many have been looked after, some even improved with green lush gardens; others, perhaps most, are vandalised, graffitied and surrounded by garbage in the deep terra cotta dust. Most have things like prams on their rooves and mangy dogs hanging around in packs.
Wadeye is one hour’s flight south-west of Darwin—about five hours by road in the dry, via Daly River. This was the place that the anthropologist and linguist W.E.H. Stanner did much of his later work. His best-known book was tellingly titled White Man Got No Dreaming and it is with him that the cultural triumph of these people first found traction.
Wadeye’s Catholic church and the school sealed their fate with a bilingual policy that dominated from 1972 till the mid-Nineties, so people over about forty years of age, who were pre-bilingual education (pre-self-determination, pre-alcoholism, pre-invasion/genocide/stolen generation, pre-apology and pre-“racism”) can still read and write. People under forty, however, cannot speak English, are functionally illiterate and have little idea of numbers.
You need a permit from the Northern Land Council to enter this settlement, and you need permission from the big men here to enter any country which is outside the settlement, off the road to the beach or the road to Daly River, or even the road to the tip.
So you are caged in from the moment you arrive. You live in a “donga”, which is a shipping container. The donga is caged, the school is caged—the whole town is caged and locked in.
Whitefella teachers walk around with backpacks containing their valuables and great bunches of keys around their necks in the thirty-eight-degree heat.
The settlement is caged because of the enormous number of break-ins and the mindless vandalism perpetrated constantly, often by children.
The school where I am working attempts to teach children to read and write, but exaggerates its attendance figures. It needs to be constantly employing new teachers, as they often only last a matter of days or weeks before they are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem, the complete lack of discipline and the primitive circumstances under which they must work and live.
There is no need to play up the extent of the massive social and educational “disadvantage” or more specifically, the mayhem, anger or passive revolution here—it is obvious.
The children who attend school regularly or even irregularly are often tired from lack of sleep, or are hungry and irritable. The school feeds each child breakfast, morning tea and lunch, every day. The teachers are, without exception, exhausted from the huge demand of teaching classes of children, many of whom would be on Ritalin if they were city kids.
The teachers live in a constant low-level fear fuelled by intermittent dog attacks, the hardly suppressed resentment and violence within the community, the total lack of respect, mindless vandalism, foul language and “motherf@cker” mentality of the children, the difficulty in obtaining basic food supplies and the insufficient, caged and very basic accommodation (which often requires them to be moved around at a moment’s notice), the lack of being able to go for a decent walk out of the township, and lack of sleep due to the all-night noise.
A Very Long & Depressing Read
Oh wait a minute, I translated that wrong from the bizzaro world gazette.
It actually says wouldn’t dare.
But geez wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Break news (Sarc): Gallant Lord Persutto has slain Moira Dragon Nazi person of bleedage Deeming. Persutto flanked by his ‘Knights who cannot say She’ strode from the party meeting room back to the Official Cubbyhouse (password required for entry) to celebrate this momentous victory. Through a locked door the Victorian SFLs announced their success and future strategy. ‘We killed a Nazi and demand a medal just like WWII. Our next step is to glue ourselves together and stage a sit in on the Monash Freeway. …’
The Australian Liberal Party’s future in one Display.
This doesn’t make any sense.
This doesn’t make any sense.
Man, 30, dies with ping pong ball up his bum…
The ball was up shit creek without a paddle.
Latham could do better then that with that material.
Just rewatched excerpts from Trump’s CNN Townhall. What a loss to the world when this guy was cheated.
Zatara – You angling for work at the Bee?
woof!
https://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/issue-634/#stop
Hendo picked up that Labor’s budget was able to include Future Funds funds. Phil Coorey declared, had the same been allowed of Scomo, the surplus would’ve been $7Bn in his last year in office.
No wait, she’s serious…
https://nypost.com/2023/05/11/i-make-men-submit-a-500-word-essay-to-date-me/
I make men submit a 500-word essay to date me: Do not waste my time
This music plays through my head the whole time reading that toxic cringe.
I’m sure the Bilingual Policy was pursued with the very best intentions, just like all the other failures.
And if you disagree, you’re a bigot.
Don’t worry, the surplus is calculated, like, in the future, dude.
Ted Chalmers and Bill Shorten are on this!
Shorten’s election voting campaign:
“I’ll put one in your box”
You’ve struck them dumb, Lysander. 😀
Dotsays:
May 12, 2023 at 4:31 pm
This doesn’t make any sense.
2nd one does, it was the bilingual policy that sealed their fate, not the missionaries.
Ive seen the same in towns in the underclass overall. Parents (more likely grandparents) can read write ‘rithmatic, but the kids struggle
Wrong theme tune Dot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x622m18ut74
Latham was on 2SM today speaking about the greenwich mince. He was very good. Apparently the poofta deadline has not expired yet and Latham will counter-sue if any moves are made on him.
I have dreams about being in possession of super glue and a lifelike latex dildo, oversized, for the next time I run into one of those protests. Not like they could stop you from affixing it to their foreheads if they are stuck to road.
Rabz:
Something that escapes our modern politicians is that – within reason – cutting taxes increases revenue because people spend their own money more efficiently, and raising taxes decreases revenue for the same reason.
So why don’t they cut taxes if they need more money?
I suspect it’s because raising taxes is a way to demonstrate power and they want that more than increased taxation.
The yay vote.
Nays by elimination:
Batting
Crewther
Heath
Hodgett
McArthur
McCracken
McGowan
Riordan
Smith
Tilley
Wells
She initially added the requirement to her profile as a joke, but many bachelors took it seriously.
SIMPS!
A chicken in every pot.
Thank you for this comment, though reading it late in the day, been up since 4:30am and had a really good day – All we can do is do the best we can, with sincerity and integrity. That is all.
…but if the policy “ended”…???? in 1996?
Belle Delphine
She’s the Michael Jordan of E-girls. She dominated, retired for a bit and then came back stronger
Friday’s are usually dead in the city these days.
But today it was busier than usual.
Not Thursday night heaving, but still busy all the same.
That’s why I come to the Çat.
The old thief’s antics in Ireland make Keating look classy. What a steaming old turd the old thief is, just like the one in his undies. Same US shame.
Shame US shame.
The Panthers need to stop training so hard.
When you have a player blowing out a testicle in a training session, you need to dial it down a bit.
I wonder if Thursday night shopping is benefiting from drunken shoppers making impulse buys?
Dot says: May 11, 2023 at 11:59 pm
Dot lied there. Pretended I said something I didn’t. The proof is that he will be unable to quote any comment of mine from the last 48 hours in which I said Trump was guilty of Jean Carroll’s allegation.
And by implication everyone that upvoted his lie is a moron who would rather not believe their own eyes.
I even explicitly said there could be other good reasons for thinking he didn’t do it, which is incompatible with any declaration that he dunnit. Cannot see how that can be misinterpreted other than wilfully.
To show that a form of argument is false, as I did, does not disprove the conclusion, it only invalidates the given argument, and it is a fallacy to think otherwise. Your conclusion can only be right for the right reasons, you can’t be right for the wrong reasons. If you’re a lawyer you should know this.
This is why the NT News needs to cover Rugby League.
Hand this in to your general studies teacher kid to see how clever you are. The lawsuit wasn’t even successful in convincing civil jurors of rape. Sexual misconduct and defamation is what he was found liable for.
You then went on to say you think it was possible that he raped her but you believe in the criminal standard of the presumption of innocence.
Piss off.
Does the Drumgold Shitshow continue next week? I’m keen for more popcorn…
Happens to the best of us. Even Alby Mangels.
2nd one does, it was the bilingual policy that sealed their fate, not the missionaries.
The Catholic Church was the instigator of Bilingual Education in Wadeye.
Anyone coulda predicted that it would cause a disaster, but no one cared enough.
Haiti is another success.
How does one “blow out a testicle”?
Shorten’s election voting campaign:
“I’ll put one in your box”
Chloe can attest to that.
Body on body contact so hard the nut ruptures.
Dot:
Wouldn’t go near it with a ten foot Pole.
Or even a nine foot Hungarian.
Proscuitto has the chutzpah to say he’ll continue to work with Moira Deeming as a cross-bencher.
Memo to Moira, here’s what you say to him…piss off.
Does the Drumgold Shitshow continue next week?
Yep, Monday and Tuesday, when Whybrow takes the stand. Drumgold likely to be back week after.
The UNSPOKEN Reason Mass Shooters are Increasing
When you have a player blowing out a testicle …
Happens to the best of us. Even Alby Mangels.
Ahh, so thats what the eye candy in the knitted string bikinis with him were for.
Emergency testicle resuscitation.
LOL, the “surplus” that m0nty the fat fascist was gloating about on Tuesday turns out to be the result of an accounting trick.
The same trick, if used by Morrison/Friedchickenburger, could have produced a larger surplus for them. I wonder did Treasury ever suggest it to them, or did they save that one for their Labor maaaaates?
dover0beachsays:
May 12, 2023 at 5:36 pm
With regard to my emails
to Liberal scabs, I targetted the five mongrels who moved the Expulsion motion. I also included Persutto.
LOL, the “surplus” that m0nty the fat fascist was gloating about on Tuesday turns out to be the result of an accounting trick.
It’s nothing new.
All governments have done it since 2003 when these structural deficits started to get baked into the financial future of Australia.
Fascinating and terrifying.
‘Culture’ as a paralysis agent.
Thank goodness they’ll have a voice soon, and finally break 130-odd years of silence.
You presume so.
“Cut. Ah … Alby, it’s in shot again. Mate I told you this would happen in Lowes.”
Whilst Australian conservative voters are desperately seeking a conservative party which they can put faith, trust and hope into, the degenerate, pox minded, absolute lying, scheming, slimy Victorian Liberal fvckers do this.
They toss out the last remaining shreds of conservatism – BOTH WOMEN BY THE WAY – and kowtow to the vile scum of the left.
The Victorian Liberal Party leadership needs to be eviscerated, their heads displayed on pikestaffs and their carrion carcasses thrown to dogs and hyenas.
They are lower, and more dishonourable than the satan which they serve.
I’ve just discovered that the medieval slang for an act of sexual intercourse is a naughty word and puts me into moderation. Mea culpa…
I’ll have a go at this.
You would be terrible boat cake. And you have a turkey neck you tried to hide with your hair.
+ or – 10%, I reckon I’m in the game for 500 words. Meaningful words, that is.
Dot,
Sorry but the stuff about literate older Aboriginal people and the damaging idiocy of teaching them in their local language has been common knowledge for about 35 years now.
My mother as a country primary school teacher also said similar about the end of so-called stolen generations; the welfare took the kids if they didn’t go to school, so the parents made sure they went.
Nice, but why so parochial? And lets face it, an ecumenical approach to such matters would see all major parties in most states sharing the bounty they so richly deserve.
Dot retorted:
What a backpedal! You admit here I did not say he dunnit.
For completeness, here’s what I actually said. I quoted DC Draino about the claims window shenanigans then said:
For the second time, in plain English, that is not a statement that he did it, it is a statement that any argument the rigged litigation process means he didn’t do it is a false form of argument which does not establish its conclusion logically. Someone argues that A implies B. Well not (A implies B) == not (not A or B) == A and not B, which requires not only that the conclusion be the opposite but that the supporting argument that was given (A) is true – except that’s the very part that has been disproven by showing the process was rigged. So doubting the argument doesn’t affirm the opposite conclusion it just says the argument is unreliable.
If I cannot say he didn’t do it, this does not imply he did do it, and if I cannot say he did do it, that does not imply he didn’t do it, being unknown is always an option. A jury or judge may be unwilling to convict on stale and vague evidence, which is as much a statement about the jury as it is about the truth of the relevant history. Presumption of innocence is a legal doctrine and I agree with it because it means you are legally acquitted in the absence of strong evidence presented. If that actually established the truth of the universe then we could practice science by prosecuting scientists. It is the legal equivalent of permitting one scientist to do one experiment to disprove a hypothesis and no matter the result no other scientist is permitted to try it again. What is logical and what is legal are different domains. To think otherwise is to believe nobody has ever broken the law and gotten off the charge.
What do you mean “but”? These are not mutually exclusive statements. The law may acquit him of that charge because of the arguments given, it is contingent on the case presented. As I knew nothing about the facts of the Jean Carroll case I did not make any comment that was contingent upon them, such as whether he really did or didn’t do it.
This was your chance to quote me saying that Trump dunnit in spite of being acquitted, or words to that effect. You failed to do so. So gosh darn it you piss off instead. So there! Pah-toohey!
Just to make Cats even less happy with the Libs, Tassie’s government has now faceplanted. Can’t be long until the last Lib state government goes under also.
Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff ‘extremely disappointed’ by MPs Lara Alexander and John Tucker’s Liberal exit (Sky News, 12 May)
Good luck with that. The crime was to hunker up to Albo for a stupid stadium. Rabz the lot of them.
Setting them up for success in life…those bastards.
Excellent short film.
The not too distant future…
The world’s resources can no longer support a growing population.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
The Exit Plan:
A widow who lives in an overpopulated future gets a visit from a government agent. | The Exit Plan
Because farms have been “rewilded” by green governments?
Lord I hate video web meetings.
Stilted and sterile with little chance that a free flowing exchange will lead to better outcomes as ideas are fully tested and improved upon by open discussion.
Shit ideas thrive in the webcam world.
I can remember being told by one activist that Aboriginal children weren’t allowed to go to school in the 1960’s……. I shared a classroom with the offspring of some of the prominent Noongar clans…..
“We must rewild the world. Rewilding the world is easier than you think. A century from now our planet could be a wild place again. We have to do what nature has always done.”
– David Attenborough
Scratch a green and you’ll find a misanthrope underneath.
Even some full flushes are too short so I hold the button until the cistern is empty.
That was colour blind policy, btw.
White kids were “stolen” as well.
Friday night and Brittany is heading out on the town. How many thousands of dollars, tens of man hours and reputations hit the floor with her panties ?
I’m not prone to effusive praise or hyperbole, but indeed, that was EXCELLENT.
Fourteen minutes well spent.
Thanks, Steve (I appreciate your input here, even if I only click on about 20% of your links).
…the welfare took the kids if they didn’t go to school, so the parents made sure they went.
The 251s that lived beside me in the ’90s made sure the kids went to school .. having them around deterred the “customers” of their dope* business ……….
*dope dealer who, actually, lost money, Mum & Dad both smoked too much of their own product then invested in a crop up North which got sprung before harvest .. entire family did a moonlight flit with suppliers & plod hot on the trail .. no idea of the end result …… LOL!
Thanks Dover for the 11 Vic. Libs who voted “Nay”. Good to see my old mate Dave Hodgett on the list as well as Kim Wells, my former local State MP until I moved to a Labo(u)r seat.
That James Newbury from the Braaaaaghton Liberals has spooky eyes…
Yep and as contrived as that obviously all is, that still doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.
This is bullshit; echoing the persistent Pell pushers: just because the HC found him not guilty doesn’t mean he is innocent. Lehrmann is guilty of nothing criminal. This is not a fu.king Venn diagram where not guilty overlaps with not innocent. Not innocent is not there.
Now, its true that the media legal eagles are scrambling to have a voir dire where Lehrmann can be convicted at the lower civil standard. This appears to be pirate pete’s wifee’s approach. Let’s be clear: the difference between the criminal standard and the civil standard is that the criminal standard is a standard which has to met by the state and a higher standard must apply. The civil standard is a personal litigation standard where no state penalties accrue and only monetary penalties apply. If Lehrmann is found liable at the civil standard it does not mean he is guilty at the criminal standard.
“cohenitesays:
May 12, 2023 at 8:01 pm”
I think you’ve said it best.
It’s a bit unusual for cohenite and Cassie to be arguing that reality is socially constructed, but there it is.
Next stop for cohenite is queer story time, better get your skirt on cohers you’re on stage in 5 minutes.
I didn’t watch any of today’s proceedings. Not sure what Mrs Pirate Pete’s counsel was seeking to establish. Teh Paywallian reporting sounds like a few things were walked back, including some contemporaneous notes that may have lacked the requisite timing.
Roger, I have often told Woke friends that my grandmother used to hide her kids when the “welfare” man came around – in fear that they would be taken after her husband left her with eight kids to feed and look after during the Great Depression. They just look at you with that sceptical look. It is infuriating.
Rigid political world views do not succumb to Reason and Facts.
Nothing unusual about Colonel Crisp constructing his own reality, but there it is.
Crossiesays:
May 12, 2023 at 7:33 pm
Goanna says:
May 12, 2023 at 11:40 am
Plumbing blockages.
Don’t use the half flush. Always use full flush. Think of it as keeping your pipes lubricated.
Even some full flushes are too short so I hold the button until the cistern is empty.
And if some raving Green idiot (BIRM) accuses you of wasting water, draw the idiot’s attention to the Water Cycle. Round and round the water goes, where does it end up? In everyone’s hose.
A real scientist some years ago suggested that, given the Water Cycle, at some stage in their lives everyone would drink a molecule of Julius Caesar’s piss, recycled many times over the centuries.
Watching a ‘docco’ on D.B. Cooper on the teev.
I remember as a kid … good story
and a DB Cooper song for Rabz
Next stop for cohenite is queer story time, better get your skirt on cohers you’re on stage in 5 minutes.
My stories are always queer; but not in the way you mean.
This is what is wrong with the Colonel’s long winded arguments.
You assert you believe in A (a possibility), which is inconsistent with B (taken as fact (not happening) from the verdict at trial), which is also inconsistent with C (which was not and could not be proven to a higher standard (than B) of happening and that higher standard presumes p(A) = 0 until proven to that higher standard) and you assert you also believe in C.
You are simply wrong and if you cannot follow this you are illiterate; or do not understand logic; or you do not understand how simple legal concepts work.
I am sorry but you deserve to be mildly embarrassed for this mind numbing stupidity.
Sabaton “1916” (Motorhead). (YouTube music clip – cinematic).
Why We Need Behavioral Vigilantes
This ongoing noise contamination of the public sphere must end.
Jordan Neely’s death on May 1, 2023 by a Marine veteran who placed him in a chokehold after the 30-year-old, homeless African-American appeared on a New York subway train allegedly hurling garbage and verbal abuse at passengers is one extreme end of a social malady plaguing our society today: individuals who treat the public sphere as an extension of their private sphere (or lack thereof), and who subject others to their obtrusive behaviors.
Neely had been arrested over 40 times previously for various crimes ranging from lewd behavior to assaulting senior citizens. As one commentator noted: This guy has been arrested dozens of times and he is back on the subway causing people to be scared for their safety; either get some law enforcement on the subway or give citizens authority to protect themselves without recourse.
Other recent incidents include two women blasting music from their phones on a plane in flight (pictured above). The women gave the middle finger to annoyed fellow passengers. As the article points out, one of the alarming trends in travel is the rise of people using personal speakers in public and carrying on loud phone conversations without using headphones.
Another recent article describes a woman voted off a Frontier Jet for lobbing a barrage of vulgar expletives in an argument she started with a couple seated rows in front of her.
People who use their phones as personal speakers are polluting every pocket of the public sphere; their boisterous behavior indicates they believe they are entitled to treat shared public space as their own private space—indeed, as an extension of their disheveled bedrooms.
Why is it that so many people have no understanding of their responsibility not to dominate the public sphere, monopolize it, or even make themselves highly conspicuous and obtrusive in it? For indeed, when we draw unnecessary attention to ourselves and transgress on the personal space of others in public, we undermine the ability of others to interject themselves into that space and use it for their own limited goals and aims. However limited it might be, the public sphere is one or two spaces in which our agency as human beings unfold. We have a duty to make ourselves as unobtrusive as possible in shared public spaces so that we can allow as many participants as possible in the public sphere to feel comfortably ensconced in that space in a manner that does not compromise the reasonable way they are entitled to exercise their agency.
Those individuals who contaminate the public sphere exhibit contempt and disrespect for the idea of a shared space and the norms and mores that secure its operation for all those who inhabit it. Others may read and talk and enjoy moments of quiet or tolerate a reasonable level of volubility which does not nullify their own equilibrium and sense of equanimity.
Those guilty of emitting noise pollution, the linguistic equivalent of grunting farm animals, proclaim their vulgarity as a right—and one that normalizes thuggery as the new standard of public (mis)behavior.
This trend is permissible today only because we have two phenomena at work.
The first is massive inclusivity of uncivilized and improperly socialized persons in the public domain. I am speaking of hordes of individuals flooding the present and the future with little thought from members of society about how to assimilate such individuals into the culture when, truth be told, many of them are unassimilable.
Also, there is a concomitant radical egalitarianism at issue. Everyone must have a place at the table. The attendant forms of self-expression are permissible because what cultivated folks think of as miscreants contaminating the public domain is interpreted differently in the minds of progressives. For the latter, public domain polluters are merely committing behavioral malapropisms, a form of self-expression and, a fortiori, self-fulfillment. The truth is, such reprobates have always existed. They were called vulgar, low-class, thuggish, pedestrian at best, and they and their behaviors were stigmatized. They were shamed if they showcased their beastly sensibilities in public spaces. They were forced to retreat. In their stead, bourgeois values and virtues prevailed.
To criticize this behavior regardless of the ethnic makeup of whom it is directed toward is to incur being labeled a white cultural, civilizational imperialist. One is likely to be accused of commodifying public space into private realms. That is a form of race-capitalism, we are told.
From the Comments
– The overwhelming majority of assailants, troublemakers, and anti social miscreants are black.
That’s not a racist statement, its a stamens of fact and until society is willing to push back on the black communities and let them know their behavior will not be tolerate anymore then we can expect more of the same daily.
From Roger’s post above:
Triffids. We need to sow plantations of Triffids. Especially in high-density metropolises where they can find the, ummm … nutrients … they need.
Actually, I think I’m onto a winner for climax mange here.
Triffids. And Kraken Wakes.
I’m going to have to reread both novels now.
Bugger.
As the 832nd most prolific, popular, precocious, & perpendicular commenter here at Dover Cat, I invoke my 832nd Nation right to claim first post on the next open Fred. The Muddy’s decision is final & no rebate, ingrate, or sedative will be entered into.
If my last post is not the definition of a liberty quote, well …
Good to see you back, Muddy. I’m going to use that Triffids meme the next time some dill tells me about rewilding their regenerative carbon sink because White Man Bad.
Thanks Wally, appreciate the greeting.
With a full day of plotting world domination ahead, I’m off to rest the eyelids.
Wishing all a full night of regenerative sleep.
cohenite at 8.01:
A splendid evisceration.
Unlike you, Dot, I promise I am not trying to misrepresent what you have said.
But as you did not complete the analogy by saying what A,B,C are I have to fill them in with some imagination.
Dot says: May 12, 2023 at 8:37 pm
You have said here that you take the court verdict as fact, correct?
This May, it’s eighty years since the “Dam Busters” raid.
I wonder what the shades of those dead aircrew would make of all the knicker-wetting over the name of Guy Gibson’s dog…
God rest ye merry, gentlemen, of 617 Squadron.
World class sincerity and crock shoving.
Anyway. A judgment is assumed as fact – the civil case did not find him liable for rape, it failed even on the balance of probabilities.
Tom Shillue on Greg Gutfeld’s show is the only comedian who parodies Biden and is quite good. Every other comedian is a coward.
Dot says: May 12, 2023 at 10:07 pm
I believe court decisions are court decisions.
I implied you believed reality to be socially constructed and here you are apparently confirming that.
I don’t think there is much left to argue about there.
Given today’s expulsion of Moira Deeming by the Victorian Liberals, I’d just thought that I’d post the Liberal Party of Australia’s “Our Beliefs”, which I presume are supposed to apply to that motley groups called the Victorian Liberals….
We Believe:
In the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative
In government that nurtures and encourages its citizens through incentive, rather than putting limits on people through the punishing disincentives of burdensome taxes and the stifling structures of Labor’s corporate state and bureaucratic red tape.
In those most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy – the freedom of thought, worship, speech and association. Doesn’t apply if your name is Moira Deeming, or Bernie Finn, or Renee Heath
In a just and humane society in which the importance of the family and the role of law and justice is maintained.
In equal opportunity for all Australians; and the encouragement and facilitation of wealth so that all may enjoy the highest possible standards of living, health, education and social justice.
That, wherever possible, government should not compete with an efficient private sector; and that businesses and individuals – not government – are the true creators of wealth and employment.
In preserving Australia’s natural beauty and the environment for future generations.
That our nation has a constructive role to play in maintaining world peace and democracy through alliance with other free nations.
In short, we simply believe in individual freedom (except if you’re Moira Deeming) and free enterprise; and if you share this belief, then ours is the Party for you (except if you’re a conservative, except if you believe in biological reality, except if you don’t want cocks in frocks in women’s bathroom, except if you don’t believe Wikipedia is a reliable source of information, then “ours” is NOT the Party for you).
Here’s the truth about the Liberal Party of Australia…..”they don’t believe”.
The Dangerfields (Geelong) ran right out of both hair product and puff against, of all people, Richmond.
Extreme embarrassment.
Read that aloud, and it sounds like Savage Garden wrote it.
I think 617 Sqn sinking the Tirpitz was more definitive.
An era ended that day.
Cassie, I know naming Moira is satire…
But does the Damp Lettuce party seriously name Labor in their soyboy manifesto?
Sheesh, I remember when being a reactionary was actually kinda credible, but that just reads like Albo lives rent-free in their heads.
I want Pesutto’s leadership destroyed.
Carroll’s attorney is thinking about suing Trump again after the town hall. Trump should immediately sue her for defamation outside of NYC … is that allowed? She’s a fruit loop.
Mark Dice:
Sorry About That – Fallout After Trump CNN Town Hall Getting Worse!
Fred Sutherland, native of Peace River, Alberta, front gunner in AJ-N, flown by Australian Les Knight (who got a D.S.O. for his actions on the raid) stated when questioned on this that it was “only a dog’s name”, he didn’t care what the hound was called in the movie, & the name contentiousness shouldn’t be given a dominant place in the story, that it was being blown out of all proportion to its importance.
On his 27th operation (I may have that number wrong) they clipped some trees (night flying at low-level over darkened Europe sure had it’s moments) fatally damaging the Lancaster.
Knight pulled it up giving the crew a chance to bail out & was then killed in the subsequent crash, saving the Dutch village of Den Hamm.
Sutherland spent about three months on the run in occupied Europe, making it to Gibraltar almost unable to walk from having butchered his feet walking to Spain in ill-fitting shoes.
Having seen the escape line, & thus not allowed to go on operations, he was posted to Canada as an instructor.
At Twenty years old, & after 27 operations over Europe, three months on the run, a sea voyage home, & a week or more on by rail across Canada, he arrived in Edmonton to be met by his mum & dad.
…. and upon arrival got a tune-up on the railway platform from an officious MP, regarding his coat buttons.
The next day he got married to his home-town girlfriend. After 27 operations over Europe, including operation Chastise, baling out at night, then three months on the run, he was unable to get married without his father’s permission.
He was still under twenty-one y’see, & not yet an adult.
I’d have hit the useless barsteward, fair between the eyes…
What is left to debate is how you should be admonished for this failure to learn basic logic.
Assume
A ? C and 0 ? p(A) ? 1
However A ? B (given as fact by the jury verdict).
B is a set of C. B: (p(A) = 0)
C is a larger set which contains B. C: (p(A) = 0) which is also a special case where if p(A)[B] = 0–> p(A)[C] = 0.
However, C is otherwise not contingent on B; and the conditions for (p(A) > 0) are otherwise not met;
and hence A ? C (which has been proven superfluously).
Hence, A ? C is a contradiction.
A congruent to C
Probability of A is between 0 and 1.
A is not congruent to B.
A is not congruent to C.
A is congruent to C (is a contradiction, QED).
Fear of ‘the welfare’ was alive and well when I was a kid living away from home aged fourteen in early 1957. Parramatta Girls Home, a greatly feared place, loomed for any girl in the western suburbs seen as ‘in moral danger’. Big Sis and I didn’t go voluntarily to Church Fellowship for nothing; we saw it as protective, plus we were both employed and had put our ages up two years. But I was still in the danger zone. Sigh of relief when I turned sixteen. They could still get you till aged eighteen, but the danger was less. It wasn’t just a fear that aboriginal people had, it applied to white families too.
I believe court decisions are court decisions.
I implied you believed reality to be socially constructed and here you are apparently confirming that.
This is puerile. Court Judgments don’t define reality, they reflect it. That reality includes uncertainty. The 2 ways society deals with uncertainty is through science and legal evidence. I’ve defined the difference between criminal and civil uncertainty. It is not a construct but the only measure we have.
Now excuse me I have to iron my flamingo tutu and wash my embossed, arse fitting pink and turquoise dildos.
Lizzie
This is great.
King Arthur: What Everybody Gets Wrong
Cambrian Chronicles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs
King Arthur is one of the most famous figures in all of history, whether you’re familiar with Lancelot, or the Holy Grail, or Guinevere, or Excalibur, or the Knights of the Round Table, you’ve likely heard at least SOMETHING about King Arthur.
Very few people are aware of his actual origins, though…
Sources:
(Primary):
Geoffrey of Monmouth (1966). The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by L. Thorpe. Penguin Books.
Giles, J.A. (1848). Six Old English Chronicles. London: Henry G. Bohn.
Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae. ed. A. W. Wade-Evans. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944. https://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/padar…
Ingram, J. (1912). The Annals of Wales.
(Secondary):
Bromwich, R., Jarman, A.O.H., Roberts, B.F., Huws, D. and Charles-Edwards, T. (2008). The Arthur of the Welsh. 2nd ed. University of Wales Press, pp.1–33.
Davies, J. (2007). A History of Wales. London: Penguin, pp.46, 56-58, 66, 119-120, 130, 214, 248.
Grigg, E. (2009). ‘Mole Rain’ and Other Natural Phenomena in the Welsh Annals: Can Mirabilia Unravel the Textual History of the Annales Cambriae?. The Welsh History Review, 24(4), pp.15–17.
Higham, N.J. (2002). King Arthur: Myth-Making and History. Routledge., pp.74–216.
Higham, N.J. and Ryan, M.J. (2013). The Anglo-Saxon World. Yale University Press, pp.63-69.
Higham, N.J. (2018). King Arthur: The Making of the Legend. Yale University Press, pp.1-76, 149-248.
Johnes, M. (2019). Wales: England’s Colony? Parthian, pp.116–129.
Maund, K. (2006). The Welsh Kings. 3rd ed. The History Press Ltd, pp.18-23.
Bartrum, P.C. (1993). A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to about A.D. 1000. The National Library of Wales, pp.29-32.
Stephenson, D. (2019). Medieval Wales c.1050-1332: Centuries of Ambiguity. 1st ed. University of Wales Press, p.121.
—————–
The upshot of all of this is that the “Celts” may have simply been the [properly] (proto) Celtic Irish (“Welsh”, “Scots” [think Dal Raita, per Artuir mac Aedan]) fighting against the Celtic Britons and Romanised Celtic Britons (Picts and “Saxons”), being the invaders of Briton!
The battles that “Arthur” fought in were 100 years apart; the narrator did not mention the specialness of the name Arthur; being a form of Olaf or Oliver and being a title reserved for the “all father” like Odin.
Please. No maths while people are drinking.
It’s OK KD, it is only mid May so the Pies have a few weeks remaining as Premiers.
On another note, Richmond need to immediately apologise for the continuous booing of Tom Stewart. I’m sure the media will be on to that tomorrow.
The Daily Mail has a terrifying story about a teacher at a Nottinghamshire County Council primary school who is in deep do-do for raising concerns about a child who had “transitioned”.
At the age of 6.
The wide ranging support for the little girl’s pretence of being a boy (male name, male pronouns, male changing rooms, male toilets) tells me that adults in the UK are NOT in charge.
Great tail-end tale, Sal, thanks for typing it out!
Article in the Herald Sun from ten years ago about John Pesutto’s father.
(Pesutto jnr was a nobody at the time, the article is about his dad)
Standout part:
Mr Pesutto … was urged to join a protest at the Bonegilla migrant camp … burning special booklets that recorded how much money they owed the Federal Government for their assisted voyages to Australia.
“I thought that was the wrong thing to do. I was very happy to be in this country and I was thankful to the government system,” he said.
Mr Pesutto kept his payment booklet and quickly paid off his debt of 111 guineas, which is the equivalent of thousands of dollars today.
He put the last payment in a letter and sent it to Canberra, together with an apology for his poor English.
“An official wrote back saying, `You can write it in Chinese as far as we’re concerned, we are just so pleased that you are the one who paid up from Bonegilla,”’
The apple sure fell a helluva long way from the tree.
Thanks Wally.
To be clarify a few points;
Fred Sutherland was Canada’s longest surviving Dambuster when he died a few years ago.
Knight’s crew (incl Fred Sutherland) were not shot down on operation Chastise (dambuster raid) but several months later on operation Garlic.
I typed it from memory, the exact number of ops Sutherland flew (& the whole of Knight’s crew, who’d been together for 25 ops prior to transferring into 617) wasn’t crucial to the tale & I didn’t look it up as it’d have taken me half the night to find.
Actually I’m not sure if any direct enemy action played a part in bringing them down, or if they just hit trees.
After he hit the silk & landed somewhere in Netherlands, Sutherland was taken in by a group of a dozen or so outlaws hiding in the woods. Regular Dutchmen who’d taken to the bush to avoid labour conscription, or the Germans generally.
One of the group was a Jewish lad, who the others wanted to drive out, for fear that if Jerry ever rumbled them, they’d be all the worse for harbouring a yellow-star. The Dutch copper who led the band was emphatic that the lad stayed put.
Years later Sutherland (Alberta) & the lad were mates, after the lad migrated to NYC, & they visited from time to time. Sutherland was a public servant (in the Alberta Forestry Service), though there’s about 15 yrs between him being demobbed & joining the forestry where I don’t know, (or certainly cannot recall) what he was up to.
Whatever it was, he’d earned the right to do it.
Noticed some booing of umpires during the tiges bashing of the pussies.
Didn’t notice that any of the umps had a splash but they must have. Cos booing is racist.
Yes it is.
Thanks, Dot, for the Arthur video. I will watch it later, too tired tonight.
There is a whole edifice of legend written around the notion of Arthur; too much for any one person to deal with, especially when it veers into the literary analyses. It is highly accretative. The notion of an historical Arthur is untenable on the evidence and I certainly can offer reasons why a lot of that ‘evidence’ is spurious when analysed in context, i.e originating in misconceptions about the work of Gildas in a time when Gildas provided the main, almost only, written record of the immediate post-Roman period in Britain. It is a mess of misapprehensions arising from a religious conflict of the period. The vagueness provided a flexible template for a number of political opportunists to use the concept of a great hero for their own purposes, right up until the end of the Tudor period. After that, the Renaissance turned literary attentions elsewhere. Interestingly, a political spin was once more put upon a ‘cultural’ Arthur in High Victorians times with the romantic anti-industrial backlash and a desire to reconstitute an heroic past of Britons and Saxons in medieval knightly garb. Exemplified in the poetry of Tennyson and the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and the tapestries that still adorn the Robing Rooms of the House of Lords.
I see that Bernard Cornwall’s Arthurian trilogy The Winter King is now being filmed. This is entirely a novel constructed around the Arthurian names with a highly creative use of some the legendary personnas (Lancelot for instance is a turned into big baddie and a coward). This triology contains not a jot of history, as Cornwall will readily admit, but because The Last Kingdom does contain a strong historic thread, then this next series may well become just another piece of invented Arthurian lore as a modern-day fix of Arthur in the popular imagination.
Dot. Nick Higham is an excellent historian and source of good discussions about evidential material. I have used his work to inform some of my own (with acknowledgement) but he is weak on the work of Gildas. His strength is in the analysis he presents of the Welsh Historia Brittonum, ninth century. The Welsh have a strong hold on the Arthurian corpus because much of it that has come down to us was in Old Welsh and passed down in much latter written Welsh legends and in the Lives of early Welsh saints (who battled with Arthur, no surprises there). Much of it seems to have come from the northern regions, which were once a part of Wales. But this old god also raises his head right throughout Britain including Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall, and also in parts of Europe, anciently in folkloric sources there too. In France he is found in the name of Alator, in Scandinavia and Germany in variants of Ulifer (these names descending from Allfader, All Father). The Old Norse variant Alfthur is the one that in Britain led to the name of Arthur (see my Quadrant article) although the ancient Roman Gens called Artorius (inflecting the ancient Basque word Ator, meaning father) may have been carried early to Cornwall by Phoenician tin traders. Ator itself may in deep time represent the tor, the bull god of the Cretans and Myceneans, plus indeed the bull god of the ancient hunting cultures of the Lascaux ice-age retreat caves. The culture of the bull is a strong European meme even today. Very old stuff.
You can see that what I have tried to offer, and it is very original, is a ‘general theory’ of Arthur, looking at the whole of the remnant materials and seeing a theme recurrent, and tracing how this theme represents an ancient deity who became personified. But others have also said that to some extent, or something similar and more diffuse about a deity. My significant contribution is in identifying for the first time the name that allows me to trace exactly how, and especially why in terms of religious conflict, this personification emerged. I can then trace in textual materials over nearly two millennia how Arthur’s heroic persona grew, and to investigate the salience it continues to hold folklorically.
I see in more recent Arthurian work that some of my ideas are seeping in. Getting my analysis of Gildas (the start of it all) out before I fall off the twig is my ongoing concern, but others could do that now if I don’t. Collating the evidence properly is more important than going fast. I do it in fits and starts in the interstices of my life. My observations are basically in the common arena now and my Quaddie article is circulating slowly, to some good effect apparently.
Lizzie:
My second sister was threatened with the Parramatta Girls Home for being an ‘uncontrollable child’.
She’s a redhead – what did they expect?
🙂
Cohenite said:
Yes. There is some element of uncertainty in determining the real history but the verdict proceeds nonetheless and does its best to reflect the reality as interpreted by the experiences of the judges and the evidence. Nice to know Cohenite has seen the light and joined the correct side (my side) in the argument.
Dot fired up his math-engine and poured this crud into it (again):
Everything that follows is a waste of time, as it was founded upon a falsehood – which admittedly is nonetheless the rule our society must operate upon if a centralised system of justice is to be seen to be delivering justice and closure. Yes I’m going to invoke this classic: The map is not the territory. Understanding the reality and the understanding of the reality are two different kettles of fish is really the crux of the thing. That does not undermine the value to our society of the principle of being assumed legally innocent until proven guilty, because we find punishment of an innocent to be more abhorrent than letting a guilty party off the hook.