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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | So, how long until Pauline gets her "anti-Greek" platform together? I suspect it's a great disappointment to their party that the bloke in the red car yesterday wasn't a Muslim (and preferably a very black one from Somalia).
The score at the moment is: every Muslim terrorist in Australia ever, 2 deaths (providing they count the one accidentally shot by the police); one out of control guy with a stolen car being chased by about 25,000 police, 4 deaths and counting. |
I'm hearing the he is a muslim (not sure if that's true).
The rag on the head..... hiding their identity, why have CCTV cameras if some people can hide their identity?
Speeding offences caught on camera can also be blamed on anyo e if a rag is covering ones face. You know, mother rag wearer takes the fine and points for daughter/sister/mothet/friend rag wearer who is almost out if points.
It has to go!
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Tannin wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | The fact that the Left tend to defend the burqa, with all of its associations with patriarchy, ignorance and fear of female sexuality, while getting het up about billboard advertising that shows sexism, is all very curious. |
It's beyond curious, it's mind-boggling.
But, of course, it's not the "left" which does that. It's those loopy 4th wave feminists, who are, in their own way, as terminally deluded and blind to demonstrable fact as One Nation and the alt-right are in their way.
The left just shuffles its feet and mumbles vague agreement because - let's face facts here - the left lost its balls along with its direction decades ago (you remember that, in Australia it was the Hawke-Keating era, in the UK you had Tony Blair and his Tories-in-drag fellow-travelers ripping apart the Labor tradition) and doesn't stand for anything in particular anymore.
This is why we are seeing the rise of
(a) Trump, Brexit, One Nation, et al. These loonies are appealing to working people of limited intelligence who are - credit where it's due - at least smart enough to see that the left establishment has no plans, no direction, no passion, and no clue. OK, they are abandoning the frying pan for a very, very hot fire, but they aren't smart enough to figure that out. Which is why Trump.
(b) Left renewal leaders like Corbyn and Sanders. Here in Australia, Labor is still limping along under decent-but-lack-lustre types such as Shorten. We won't see our own left renewal leader hit the headlines for a couple more years yet. His name is Wat Price Tully and when he enters politics everything will change.
Keep the faith, Comrade! Our time will come. |
Yes, when I use the term "the Left", it is the postmodern trendy left that I meant. Because that pathetic painted Weimar-like thing is all that remains, sadly , of a real Left tradition that did a lot of good for working people (including my family) between 1900 and 1960.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Well said. Make that "1960" a "1980". As to the other lot, calling that mob "the left" is ridiculous. They wouldn't recognise an exploitation or a class struggle if you mixed it with herbs and garlic and stuffed it up their backsides.
Mind you, we tend to call religious lunatics opposing gay marriage, Sunday football, and abortion "the right", which is just as silly.
Yes, there are overlaps. That disgraced Family First scammer from South Australia, for example, was hard right in the true sense, and also an anti-freedom religious nutter. That's not uncommon. Similar overlaps exist between many people on the left and vacuous postmodern trendies like (just to choose an example completely at random) David.
(Disclaimer: David isn't really vacuous, he's a very smart guy with a lot of worthwhile perspectives and a colourful sprinkling of weird on top. But it's more fun to call him a vacuous trendy. Brings him out of his hutch spitting fire and lettuce every time.)
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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There ain't nothing trendy about me. 
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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swoop42 
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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If for no other reason randy Australian men want to be able to perve on hot Muslim women.
Ban the burqa I say.
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He's mad. He's bad. He's MaynHARD! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Do you have strong feelings about politics? |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Mugwump wrote: | | I really do not know where to start with this. Firstly, Western social conservatives' idea of modesty has never involved turning women into human shrouds with a grill. The instances I gave were actual, the comparable case you suggested is clearly specious. |
That's a picture of two women being escorted from a beach in 1920s in Chicago for wearing inappropriate swimwear – swimwear that, today, would be seen as absurdly prudish. The same thing could have happened at any public Australian beach up until around the 1950s when bikinis became fashionable (and, more importantly, no longer illegal).
To ban an item of clothing like the niqab for being culturally incompatible, one has to at least be able to appeal to some kind of coherent tradition. The fact is that we have none; what is considered an 'Australian' approach to clothing and gender roles today didn't exist fifty years ago. What is the inherent, unchangeable rule that you are appealing to here: that the face must not be covered in public? How then, can you explain the uncontroversial existence of sunglasses? If it's the idea of free consent as opposed to subjugation, see more on that below:
| Mugwump wrote: | | And why do you consider religious liberty a higher value than women's equality as expressed in our culture ? That seems highly arbitrary to me. I'd say that both are values, and both can be accommodated short of the burqa. |
Religious liberty is the liberty for the Catholic Church to refuse to let women serve as priests, or to not give communion to gay people. Religious liberty is the liberty for orthodox Rabbis to insist that Jewish women be required to wear wigs or headscarves in public. The niqab may seem an extreme example in comparison, but it is no different fundamentally: it is something that adherents to a religion in most cases willingly adopt.
You can talk about hegemony – a willing acceptance of one's own oppression – here if you like, so long as you can accept that mainstream Australian culture, too, has plenty of its own hegemony. As one example, some old-fashioned feminists may look at young women wearing extremely revealing clothing and feel that they're slaves of the patriarchy: it doesn't mean that the solution is for such clothing to be banned.
Freeing oneself from hegemony has to be a free and organic choice – you can't send in the marionettes from Team America: World Police to 'liberate' someone who doesn't want to be liberated. Surely Iraq has taught us that, if nothing else.
| Mugwump wrote: | | Finally, your certainty about the future is surely speculative, not certain at all. We have seen Islamicisation of our culture - including the use of the burqa and demands for Sharia law - grow relentlessly during the last ten years. What is makes you so insouciantly certain of the victory of decency through tolerance of a barbarous practice ? |
I can tell you precisely why. Culture, to me, is kind of like gravity. While a bigger and smaller force interact with each other and both draw the other closer, the bigger force always ends up dominating. Consider the Earth and the Moon: the Moon affects the way the Earth spins, but it is the Moon that orbits the Earth and not the other way around.
Likewise, Australia's small Muslim minority (2%, at last count?) is being and will continue to be shaped by the culture that surrounds them. This is inevitable: one does not, after all, get to choose the culture that they are born into or how that will affect them. While we know that families and religious communities exert a substantial influence over us, they are only two forces among the many that shape our personalities – others being media, entertainment, peers, authority figures like schoolteachers and broader cultural expectations and behavioural patterns that carry through everyday interactions.
The proportion of each influence will fluctuate according to the individual's circumstances (did they go to a public or Muslim school? Did their parents let them watch TV when they were growing up?), but even the most sheltered Australian-born Muslim is going to be a little more 'Australian' in outlook, behaviour and speech patterns than their parents, and the same will follow for the next generation. That process doesn't just occur downwards, but sideways too: the Australian Muslim community is necessarily more Australian than the sort of neighbourhoods that most Muslim immigrants are coming from. All these factors have an effect on how people think and behave.
This isn't in any way a homogenous process, needless to say: you can still think like an Australian in many ways and wear a niqab. The obvious point here, though, is that the more you think like an Australian, the less likely you are to want to wear a niqab or force that upon your children. That "less likely" is the key here, because that is what will affect prevalence over time – it doesn't mean that Person X from the fourth generation won't become radicalised, or "born again".
This is a general rule. There are exceptions, and we need to understand why those exceptions exist. The first is the instance where a minority is segregated or segregates itself from the majority as Jews did in Europe for the better part of 2000 years or the Copts have done in Egypt since Muslim conquest. The key factor in such cases seems to be oppression: because the minority has been marked as an 'other' in such cultures and not permitted to fully integrate, they tend to close ranks and much more heavily enforce group membership. I'm sure this phenomenon has been discussed at length. An interesting comparison is the US, which saw high numbers of Jewish immigrants who were, for nearly the first time in history, permitted to practice their faith without interference – there, you seem to have a much higher proportion of non-religious or liberal Jews than elsewhere.
That's the choice we have here: do we want the state to interfere in orthodox Muslim communities by telling them what they can and cannot wear and punishing non-compliance, thus alienating them and forcing them deeper into cultural ghettos, or do we take a liberal approach, with the exception of actually harmful things like female circumcision? Do we want to open up and let integration happen, or clamp down just like every other intolerant majority culture in history and insist that Muslims "be more like us" or face the consequences?
Surely we know the answer to this. If conservatives like Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull can understand it, it shouldn't be that hard for everyone else.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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FWIW I don't have the slightest problem with Muslim women wearing the head scarf and covering their body if they're doing it voluntarily and not being forced to by cultural or religious expectations.
The ones that cover the face however should be given the boot.
It's a minority of Muslims of the more extreme fringes who do this and i don't think it should be condoned. It's hardly marginalising all Muslims, just making a statement to a small minority of Muslims that there are things that are common place in a Muslim country under Sharia law that are not acceptable in western society.
Female genital mutilation
Forced marriages of minors
banning women from attending school, and
full face coverings in public.
All symptoms of a religious culture that treats women like shite and that any sensible person, particularly those from the self styled progressives, should consider abhorrent.
My SIL rides a motorcycle with an open face helmet and wears a bandana style covering over his lower face and Sunnies. if he walks into a bank, or many other businesses, he's expected to remove the helmet and face covering.
We make concessions toward various religious groups but at the end of the day, the common law of the land over rides religious beliefs, like it or not
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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5150 
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
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Stui for the win....
SWISH!!! From down town!!! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Who or what is down town? |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ David, credit to you for honestly trying to address the points I made. As with all things, this ultimately a matter of faith and belief, as we can choose to accent different facts according to the form of life we care for. Facts are therefore unlikely to resolve this issue. I'll make two last points :
1. The photo from a hundred years ago (is there no statute of limitations?) shows no burqa, and shows behaviour no reasonable conservative has argued for in the memory of anyone alive. It shows that one can find evidence for anything if one goes back far enough and makes a curious interpretation, but that's surely all it shows.
2. Your theory of cultural gravity is a good metaphor. Gravity is not a matter of size, but mass. A small dense planet can have far more gravity than a gas cloud. In other words, a group of people who believe passionately in something can change attitudes profoundly. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" etc.
When a majority believe in little, and have little foundational knowledge of the things they do believe, then change can be startling in the face of true beilevers. There is an excellent youtube clip of Christopher Hitchens reacting scornfully to the doyenne of the British liberal party, no less, Baroness Shirley Williams, objecting to the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie on grounds of "offence". It is worth watching, as it is quite representative of the moral and political cowardice of much of our liberal elite. I would suggest that it disproves your theory well.
You may be right about 2%, I do not know. I can tell you that by the time you get near 10%, as we are in much of Europe, things like this become mainstream. When you feed and appease the indefensible, history does not suggest that it abates. When you licence the furthest extremes, mere backwardness becomes normalised.
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Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Tue Jan 24, 2017 12:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| stui magpie wrote: | FWIW I don't have the slightest problem with Muslim women wearing the head scarf and covering their body if they're doing it voluntarily and not being forced to by cultural or religious expectations.
The ones that cover the face however should be given the boot.
It's a minority of Muslims of the more extreme fringes who do this and i don't think it should be condoned. It's hardly marginalising all Muslims, just making a statement to a small minority of Muslims that there are things that are common place in a Muslim country under Sharia law that are not acceptable in western society.
Female genital mutilation
Forced marriages of minors
banning women from attending school, and
full face coverings in public.
All symptoms of a religious culture that treats women like shite and that any sensible person, particularly those from the self styled progressives, should consider abhorrent.
My SIL rides a motorcycle with an open face helmet and wears a bandana style covering over his lower face and Sunnies. if he walks into a bank, or many other businesses, he's expected to remove the helmet and face covering.
We make concessions toward various religious groups but at the end of the day, the common law of the land over rides religious beliefs, like it or not |
But... wearing a burqa is not illegal and never has been. So...?
I'm fine, I guess, with a bank or business objecting to customers coming in with their faces covered. I'm not sure if discrimination law permits them to do so, but I can see the case for either side there. But a government banning the garment altogether and punishing those who don't comply is a very different matter. And that's the thing: whether or not you think women are being forced to wear it, they'll be the ones who suffer the consequences in the long run, whether that be in getting harassed by police or having to stay indoors. And surely no-one who actually cares about their well-being wants that.
In your list above, the odd one out is clearly the niqab/burqa: that is the one that is merely a symbol of oppression, whereas the other three are actual instances of oppression in action. You might decide to draw the line there anyway, but keep in mind that other religions have symbols of oppression too in the way women are forced to dress in public as opposed to men. Some might even say high heels and make-up are symbols of oppression and of women's perceived inferiority in our own society, and they would probably have a point.
So, at best I would see the niqab as sitting in a kind of grey area between the instances of actual oppression you list and more mundane symbols of gender inequality. But I still ardently oppose banning it for all the reasons I've listed previously.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: |
But... wearing a burqa is not illegal and never has been. So...?. |
So something that was not illegal, is made illegal. that's never happened before?
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Last edited by stui magpie on Wed Jan 25, 2017 6:21 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| Like, say, gun ownership in Australia? As between the two possible laws, I know which is the more pressing. |
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swoop42
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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So if burqas are allowed because of religious freedom I take it I'm allowed to wear my klan robe for sun protection?
Us Honkeys have sensitive skin.
_________________
He's mad. He's bad. He's MaynHARD! |
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