Burqa
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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My issue here is less with the rights and wrongs of the burqa or niqab per se than with the sheer bloody-minded opportunism of making it a topic of discussion now. We sign up for a completely foreign war on the other side of the world, and all of a sudden our old friends the terrorist scare campaign and "ban the burqa" are back again. What's next, Halal Vegemite?
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think positive
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Yup you can ban that too. Why pay extra for food for certification for a few, which is probably just a scam, to make money. This halal certification makes prices rise, why should we pay for it?
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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Don't get me started on halal. Meat processing is bad enough as it is, but to slit an animal's throat without stunning because this was the practice in the Middle East 1300+ years ago is reprehensible. Apparently the knife is supposed to be super-sharp and therefore it doesn't hurt..... hmm....
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | My issue here is less with the rights and wrongs of the burqa or niqab per se than with the sheer bloody-minded opportunism of making it a topic of discussion now. We sign up for a completely foreign war on the other side of the world, and all of a sudden our old friends the terrorist scare campaign and "ban the burqa" are back again. What's next, Halal Vegemite? |
That's the immediate propaganda, agreed. The simple test is this: What would a PR company being paid millions do?
The broader issue is simply people's inability to deal with a fast-changing, complex world, especially when we use "delusional mastery" as a means of motivating ourselves to get things done in the world.
The greatest tool in the bigots armory is freaking out that people are different, and then assessing them as if they're the same. I mean, it's a beauty because it slips straight under the rational guard of most Homo sapiens, brainwashed as we have been into the delusion that our opinions are worth hearing because they're decisively and purely right (the omniscience delusion).
The world has compressed at an astonishing rate, but very unevenly. Not only do many things only make sense from within a context to those who have been immersed in that context, but there are all sorts of outdated anomalies within every specific context, and different opinions within the one context. This has been and always will be the case as ideas flow around the world, here bumping into barriers, there finding a way through, there being replaced by a fine alternative.
As I always say, if I can pull apart what people say about Korea as absolute imaginary rot, what would a cultural expert on Islamic people groups be able to do? The difference between people within Islam would be astonishing if you understood it well enough.
The intellectual idiocy in these discussions is that you cannot lift an element from an entire other and mostly unknown context and compare it to an element in another cultural or even personal context, unless you can show that element has the anthropo-socio-psychological infrastructure needed to sustain itself, or even be comprehended as a discrete entity, within that context.
This is Hitchens/Harris-like anthropo-socio-psychological ignorance, and why I have always deemed them to be very dim and uninteresting chaps (apologies to you, among others, who somehow glean something from them!). Such ill-logic can only be generated in the head of a person who either lacks the experience to know how pervasive context is in the lives of themselves and the vastly differing billions of others out there, or lacks the psychological capacity and self awareness to deal with the ambiguity and complexity of the world as it is.
Either way, such people should never be scientists or educators. Clerics and demagogues, maybe. But not people charged with understanding both the unity and the variation of humanity with any subtlety.
Contexts are not frictionless; they're massively intertwined 3D jigsaw puzzles. We isolate components only to understand their stable, universal properties better, not to pretend we ought to be able to transplant elements arbitrarily at any time and place from one to another without them being rejected by the naturally self-sustaining defenses anthropo-socio-psychological systems.
There simply are no general positions to take on these things, and no specific ones either because context works just as powerfully at both scales. Welcome to the postmodern age.
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | Don't get me started on halal. Meat processing is bad enough as it is, but to slit an animal's throat without stunning because this was the practice in the Middle East 1300+ years ago is reprehensible. Apparently the knife is supposed to be super-sharp and therefore it doesn't hurt..... hmm.... |
Agreed
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ ptid, i think you are overlooking the fact that there is a very specific context in play, here, namely the context of contemporary Australia's society, and the incompatibility of patriarchal repression with that society. That such repression was born in another context, and makes sense in another context, is significant to the individual wearing the burqa, but it is not itself an affirmation in this context.
Now, Australian values are thankfully wide enough to accommodate a wide range of cultural practice and diversity, and the range of things that are severely frowned upon are relatively few, by the standards of most societies in history. These values may be rooted in near-universal human desires like freedom to choose one's destiny, hold power to account, etc, or they may be mere convention, rooted in history and mutable through time.
In either case, they have great power and presence in the lives of most people who live in Australia now, and no elite or minority has a licence from the people who live here to ordain that this society be a postmodern laboratory where ancient forms of oppression and cruelty (including halal slaughter, demanding Salman Rushdie's death or whatever) are above critique and even restraint. They may claim that licence, but that does not mean that it must be given simply because they are a minority.
I assume you've read Jacques Derrida, as his framework is very relevant to your world view ; if you haven't then you should (though one should always read on the other side, not the friendly side)!
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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We've done this argument to death in other threads, but until we stop factory farming, caging chickens, feeding animals hormones and allowing cosmetics tested on animals to sit on the shelf at Coles, I don't think we're in much of a position to be taking the moral high ground on Halal (and, of course, Kosher) slaughter.
Besides, a lot of (if not most) Halal certification doesn't involve animal slaughter.
| think positive wrote: | | Yup you can ban that too. Why pay extra for food for certification for a few, which is probably just a scam, to make money. This halal certification makes prices rise, why should we pay for it? |
Because companies view it to be in their commercial interest.
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Last edited by David on Tue Oct 07, 2014 10:07 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | We've done this argument to death in other threads, but until we stop factory farming, caging chickens, feeding animals hormones and allowing cosmetics tested on animals to sit on the shelf at Coles, I don't think we're in much of a position to be taking the moral high ground on Halal (and, of course, Kosher) slaughter.
Besides, a lot of (if not most) Halal certification doesn't involve animal slaughter. |
Well, let's not derail the thread in that particular direction, as it is merely a detail in a broader point. I will confine it to saying for my part, that there is an important difference between an economic abuse that is changing fairly rapidly in reponse to community trends, and a religious injunction.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Mugwump, believe it on not I struggled through some of On Grammatology, or whatever the ridiculous book Derrida wrote is called where he laid texts side-by-side or whatever it was! I think I get what Derrida was trying to demonstrate rather than argue, but it was still like nails on a blackboard IIRC.
Thinking back, I still have a lot of affection for Foucault as a creative thinker, and I reckon Baudrillard was so dangerously right people couldn't stand to entertain what he was saying.
On your comment about specific contexts, I think the facts speak for my views. Yes, Australia does tolerate all manner of "deviations", from weird cults to the full body tattoo and piercing crowd, to vampires, cannibals, and all manner of sexual fetishes and obsessions.
Yet not Muslim clothing!
In that context, the context you point out, it is your argument that is clearly special pleading. Take just one among hundreds of arguments I could arbitrarily make here. It is fine and legal to have paid sex with often psychiatrically damaged, drug addicted young women.
Oh no, but not Muslim clothing! That's the subjugation of women!
Actually, I don't like prostitution as a phenomenon at all, but I also think prohibition is a far worse menace. And the same applies for all manner of things that *you* already tolerate. Such hypocrisy compromises your position and, as I say, renders it special pleading.
Why not go about your business and leave conservative Muslims alone as you do all manner of people doing things that make no sense to you or even seem oppressive or destructive?
And that's the very simple argument.
The more complex argument concerns the layers of the term "anthropo-socio-psychological", or whatever adjectival form of that compound you wish to deploy. You claim the context is "Australian society"; I mean really, what the heck is that? It's another of those nonsense epiphenomenal terms with no actual clear earthly referent and contains variation so great it's meaningless as anything but a coastline. Moreover, did you notice I included the psychological? Even siblings in the same household don't share the same context because their individual psychiatries, and the system of relationships they have with those immediately around them, can differ dramatically. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, anyone?
So, no matter how you look at it, your obsession with Muslim clothing is special pleading. It's simply a visceral desire some people have to see this people group disciplined and censured, and nothing to do with saving people from evil or improving the world. Again, it lacks sincerity, as we would say in Korea.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ quick response, and i'll tackle more tomorrow night, but I agree that the burqa etc should not be banned, as i said somewhere earlier. I regard it as slightly more acceptable than sex with drug-addicted damaged young women, but I heartily disapprove of both, and want both subject to social censure. Sex with drug-addicted prostitutes may be legal, because criminalisation has proved a poor way to deal with it. But it is generally censured by most people. Since i don't think you're arguing that the burqa should be despised, i'm a little lost as to the argument at that point. Similarly, full-body piercing is an expression of extreme individualism, not a negation of social and sexual identity, so it seems to me very different in character from the vestments of feminine repression.
Your comment that Australian society has no earthly referent beyond a coastline makes sense within your framework of considering only the experience of individuals as valid and abstractions more-or-less unusable, but collective life does have a very strong meaning to social apes, and I think you're defining away the ground of any contrary argument, there. Societies may be abstractions, but so are economies, armies, and the various forms of suffering and power they organise. They are no less real for that.
I laughed re Derrida, because I had a similar experience. I found him unreadable, but I think his world view (as articulated by others so that I could understand it) and your own are probably not a million miles apart. I don't know much about Baudrillard, but I believe he's more approachable so I'll give it a go.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ quick response, and i'll tackle more tomorrow night, but I agree that the burqa etc should not be banned, as i said somewhere earlier. I regard it as slightly more acceptable than sex with drug-addicted damaged young women, but I heartily disapprove of both, and want both subject to social censure. Sex with drug-addicted prostitutes may be legal, because criminalisation has proved a poor way to deal with it. But it is generally censured by most people. Since i don't think you're arguing that the burqa should be despised, i'm a little lost as to the argument at that point. Similarly, full-body piercing is an expression of extreme individualism, not a negation of social and sexual identity, so it seems to me very different in character from the vestments of feminine repression.
Your comment that Australian society has no earthly referent beyond a coastline makes sense within your framework of considering only the experience of individuals as valid and abstractions more-or-less unusable, but collective life does have a very strong meaning to social apes, and I think you're defining away the ground of any contrary argument, there. Societies may be abstractions, but so are economies, armies, and the various forms of suffering and power they organise. They are no less real for that.
I laughed re Derrida, because I had a similar experience. I found him unreadable, but I think his world view (as articulated by others so that I could understand it) and your own are probably not a million miles apart. I don't know much about Baudrillard, but I believe he's more approachable so I'll give it a go. |
It's not about my view, it's about your view; I don't have a special position on Muslim clothing because it doesn't stand out as especially peculiar to me beyond the usual range of "peculiarities" of our species. Certainly in some cases it could be psychiatrically damaging, so I'm happy to look at those cases in context as they arise. But I see no cause for special general intervention.
I am saying that even if I hated Muslim clothing, as many *others* seem to, there's still nothing I could logically do about it aside from support and education without resorting to special pleading.
Yes, I agree economies are abstractions and nonsense entities. But I have no problem with unemployment rates, inflation rates, interest rates, and so on. Just as I have no problem with immigration rates, cultural mixes, population pyramids, wealth distributions, and such. But such concrete metrics are not what you mean when you are referring to "Australian society" in this discussion.
What percentage of Muslim women in this clothing are oppressed? What percentage of Australians think clothing should be regulated? What percentage of the population thinks women being pressured to wear Muslim clothing by relatives is worse than women being pressured to give up their careers and have children by relatives? What are the psychiatric metrics pertaining to such people? The health metrics? The lifespan? the self-reported happiness levels?
The fact is, unlike an "economy", which has metrics, you have no metrics for me on this issue which persuade me that there is a peculiar issue here that needs managing in the same way that unemployment needs managing, but women working "the double shift" apparently does not need managing.
In fact, you haven't shown me that you know anything meaningful at all about the lives of Muslim women generally, and any burqa-wearing Muslim woman specifically in the same way that you know that unemployment is miserable, and the lives of the general unemployed and specific unemployed people are stressful and fraught.
Thus, even by your own standards of knowledge at any scale you don't seem to have much more than special pleading and personal desire to bring to this topic.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Last edited by pietillidie on Tue Oct 07, 2014 12:15 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | We've done this argument to death in other threads, but until we stop factory farming, caging chickens, feeding animals hormones and allowing cosmetics tested on animals to sit on the shelf at Coles, I don't think we're in much of a position to be taking the moral high ground on Halal (and, of course, Kosher) slaughter.
Besides, a lot of (if not most) Halal certification doesn't involve animal slaughter.
| think positive wrote: | | Yup you can ban that too. Why pay extra for food for certification for a few, which is probably just a scam, to make money. This halal certification makes prices rise, why should we pay for it? |
Because companies view it to be in their commercial interest. |
which is why I try to boycott them.
and as for done to death, no its not. not until every chicken is free from a cage, every pig is out of a cage, every animal is killed as humanely as possible, and Australia stops live exports, will it be done to death.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| think positive wrote: | | http://www.9news.com.au/National/2014/10/07/10/29/Sydney-strangers-help-Muslim-woman-boy-harassed-terrorism-experiment |
Hey, that's fantastic!
After Team Abbott's relentless boat people attacks, efforts to undo vilification laws and now terrorist panic, that sort of thing being highlighted will really give minorities under stress comfort.
Imagine if all that stirring up of fear and hatred to win elections, distract from tax cuts for the wealthy, and fund wars was replaced with efforts to inspire social harmony and progress?
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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1061
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| How many hours footage did they shoot for what is basically a short film and does anyone care who funded it? |
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