Posts by B Jones
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(goodness knows what that will do for the sceptic tank.)
Was that deliberate? Nice.
A sceptic tank is one in which many new life forms must be independently evolving.
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Jonty:
She who stood up in Parliament and delivered the immortal words: "all men are potential rapists".
Did she? I'd have thought that would have gotten famous enough such that one could google a reference to it that wasn't this page. Perhaps you could provide a Hansard ref, if it was in the House. There are a lot of urban legends around the more challenging aspects of feminist theory - usually it's Andrea Dworkin who gets blamed for the "all men are rapists" thing - it's a bit of a simplistic summary of her work. And the book she wrote it in was published in 1987, three years after Waring left Parliament.
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Looks like you two could have something interesting to add to the consultation on "natural" health products currently happening. Although perhaps natural, which includes vitamins and minerals, is even more prone to sloppy definition than "organic".
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Congratulations, not that I expect Danielle to be here to receive them for a while.
Let's tie it all in together by saying that from the point of view of a baby, a good book tastes interesting and doesn't give you papercuts on your tongue. A secondary consideration might be that it looks interesting when your parents wave it at you and make sounds.
Also, Watership Down is great when you're too young to understand all the scary stuff. Thanks to the post above, we've now got a second generation of innocent bunny admiration.
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You might find this of interest, if you haven’t seen it already.
Thanks, that was interesting. I like historical fiction and fantasy set in medieval worlds etc - I'm not silly enough to think they'd be good places to live.
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Also, it better have the subtitles if it's a foreign film.
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Horrible means. Good ends.
What was so horrible about the means? I can't think of any atrocities committed in the development of antibiotics (unless you're a bacterium) or contraceptives. The horrible was just horrible on its own, without any end to justify it, unless you want to get into a Hiroshima argument.
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But the scene in that really disturbed me was the one showing orcs being born -- literally -- out of mud. Pseudo-autochthones, if you will. That did seem like a nasty parody of indigeneity.
I understood that to be an oblique critique of genetic engineering (creating Uruks out of Orcs and Men) rather than any reference to any explicitly racist ideology. There are elements of miscegenation to the original which don't stand up well to modern eyes, but I think with that scene they were trying to distance themselves from more obvious and problematic ways of creating new species (anyone notice any female Orcs?).
BenWilson: any other candidates for finest century? I'm tempted to balance the odd bout of industrialised mass homicide with antibiotics, civil rights, reproductive freedom and plummetting infant mortality.
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Craig - Belich doesn't go anywhere near there, IIRC. Reforging Paradise was published not long before FOTR came out, and had some throwaway line in about NZ being seen as a utopian Britain-substitute when the old one was looking a bit worn out. I don't have my copy at hand but there was a nice line about NZ playing The Shire to the rest of the world's Middle Earth. Being stuck in immense fangirl anticipation at the time, it stood out.
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Caleb, it looks like you've read Belich's Reforging Paradise - I really liked his reference to NZ playing the Shire to the wider world's Middle Earth.
Who are the Orcs in the Fellowship of the Ring if they're not a nightmare, gothicized vision of indigeneity? And isn't it interesting that Jackson and his team chose to cast Maori and Pasifika actors in those roles, almost the only place in the films where a non-Anglo-Saxon face could be found?
Hang on a sec. You didn't see the real faces of any Orcs or Uruks in FOTR. There were all sorts cast to play them under the suits, including pakeha and women. You did see the face of a Pacific Island or Maori actor as a dead soldier in TTT - he was one of the human soldiers from south of Gondor tricked by Sauron into fighting for him. The text of the book, and the subtext of the movie, portray the soldier as human, sympathetic, in a sort of Christmas eve on the trenches sort of way. A better example of problematic treatment of indigeneity is also in TTT, when in a minor scene Saruman rarks up the Dunlanders against the Rohirrim - "they stole your land" etc. Orcs, in the mythology of the book, are clearly not indigenous - they were created in mockery of or from humans by an envious demigod. It's hard to integrate that with European racist mythology.
Rich:
the biggest threat is internal, not external?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say that the external threat managed to extend to the home front as well as the outside world - the Scouring of the Shire was still Sauron and Saruman's work.