Saturday, February 12, 2011

An Overheated Cultural Wasteland

Completely unsure about everything? Flummoxed? Afraid of any answers you might get? Sound thoughtful: just keep asking questions! The more vast and broad the more smug you can be.


Caption contest, anyone?




Elsewhere: the “true European Spirit” correctly and proudly defined as greedy socially parasitic rioters. Go on... eat the rich, they won’t be coming back, and the poor aren’t hiring. A confusedcultural obfuscator who has tried to redefine human rights to mean the European regard of itself as “cosmopolitan” notes on the Guardian’s Comment Macht Frei that:
In London and Athens, protesters are rekindling the true European spirit

The idea of Europe must go back to a democracy that resists fake economic orthodoxy and false monoculturalism.
So long as you ignore the fact that money does not grow in trees, and that most of Europe’s “true historical nature” when it comes to rioting normally involves one class, nation, and religious monoculture trying to eradicate another one.

Here’s a sample sure to rally those huddled masses yearning to be free:
The most persistent and pronounced feature of Douzinas ’ analysis relates to his effort to underscore the structural ambivalence of human rights. Vibrant sources of critical dynamism and reified crystallizations of socio-historically conditioned forces, rights are, he argues, suppressive and subversive at one and the same time, just as capable of functioning as instruments of imperialism as they are amenable to operating as agents of resistance. This is by no means surprising, for, as Douzinas notes, natural and human rights have long been understood to be comprised of two, closely related but conceptually distinguishable, dimensions. On the one hand, they have been regarded as means of opposing
oppression, be this at the hands of the state and its constituent apparatuses or the diffuse, multivectored networks of transnational governance revered by some as the harbingers of a properly ‘ post-national ’ future. On the other hand, they have been viewed as devices that serve the interests of dominant classes, entrenching and naturalizing those politico-economic structures which are most likely to consolidate their privilege and cultivate their prosperity.
Okay. Once more now. With Feeling...

Getting towards the end, it gets even worse. The “humanitarian” caste is assumed to dictatorial powers, and the purpose of all relief work is to subvert a roundabout description of “the American Empire”. It’s tripe and hate speech given an academic platform to legitimate itself, but that isn’t that much different than everything else in their overheated cultural wasteland where an “eat the rich” fantasy can take the place of thought, and still be taken seriously.

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