(Another rant I am afraid... enjoy)
I have got more than a little sick of self righteously high minded pratts preaching about the nobility of their ideas, and then failing to admit that they only hold those ideas when convenient to their politics. This sort of hyprocrisy is, to me, the worst possible failing of any politician, or idealist or idealogue of any sort.
Not acknowledging it is a clear statement that the person is an unprincipled shit, out only for what they can get.
Not recognising that there is any hypocrisy, is the sign of being too stupid to be trusted to run a church cake stall, let alone have a say in any policy on anything that might ruin people’s lives. (Sorry, forgot. Church cake stalls are illegal in the Victorian nanny state… OH&S issues and public liability now making baking a cake for privatye sale a criminal enterprise unless your kitchen passes health department guidelines, and your cake is plastic sealed and labelled with a complete list of ingredients, their origins, and the name, address and shoe size of the person who baked it…. Alright the shoe size is an exaggeration, but you get the point.)
Unhappily, the vast majority of modern politicians, journalists, lobbyists, and lawyers, are screaming hypocrites. Professionally. In fact they could not do their jobs unless they can either ignore the truth, or not recognise it in the first place.
There was a fabulous example quoted on the radio today. A few years ago a police car entered the men’s ceremonial area of a remote Australian Aboriginal tribe, with… a woman in it! Now the media had a field day with the ‘disrespect’ element of this, because of course cultural relativism argues that such a thing was disrespectful. But to do so the media happily quoted an Aboriginal elder who stated that, had the female been Aboriginal, she would have automatically been killed.
The fact that they quoted this was not a problem. It is a true reflection of Aboriginal culture. It was a true statement by the elder concerned. It was accepted by all who new the facts as a statement of reality. And, most importantly I suppose, it fitted the argument of how ‘disrespectful’ the female police officer was being to Aboriginal culture.
The problem is of course, that the statement that Aborigines reserve the right to murder women who are Australian citizens, was not remarked upon by anyone in the media. Not one single member of the press who commented on it that day thought it was a problem. (Others did later of course.) Not even the many hard line Feminists who had raged against the white ‘oppression’ of Aboroiginal culture seemed to think that it was a problem. Apparently, Aborigines are allowed to oppress women as much as they like in the eyes of an Australian Feminist, because Aborigines – also being victims of white male oppression – clearly have the right to hang on to a culture that oppresses women. In fact any attempt to stop them doing so must be racist.
Now I realise that the self avowed ‘left’ in politics has to find, or invent, causes to rage about to get people who are young enough or stupid enough motivated. (I frankly agree with the old joke that if you are not Socialist when you are 20 you have no heart – we know people’s rationalty is not fully developed until 24 or 25 – and that people who are still socialist at 40 have no brain.) But that does not excuse hypocrisy.
If you genuinely believe (as I do) that women are equal, and deserve equal rights, then you believe it for all women, in any culture. Not just for the ones who will vote for that, and not excluding the ones for whom you can get more mileage from denying those rights in the name of another supposedly honourable cause.
The reason that a police car was on the ‘men’s reservation’ in the first place, was because Australian police have the unfortunate task of trying to protect Aboriginal women from Aboriginal men despite the efforts of our Socialists and Feminists and lawyers and judges to keep them properly subjugated in the name of cultural relativity.
A court case at a similar time was about a 13 year old aboriginal girl who had been raped by a 50 year old aboriginal man. The judge was presented with serious arguments that the case be thrown out because the girl had been promised to the man as a bride by her family. (In fact her grandmother assisted with the rape!) Sad to say the cultural relativists have such a sway over the Australian legal system that the judge initially delivered a sentence of only a few weeks, explaining that the case fit more within ‘traditional cultural law’ than in modern Australian law.
Or, in other words, Australian female citizens should have no protectioin from murder or rape if that happens to fit the cultural practices of the primitive uneducated hunter gatherer tribe from which they come. (And why are they uneducated? Because the cultural relatavists have forced the missions and schools to stay away from the ‘purity’ of aboriginal tribal life… for their own good of course.)
Presumably this same approach will soon be available throughout Australia to Muslims in favour of female circumcision or honor killing, to New Guineans who would like to hang on to tribal cannabalism, and to Indians in favour of Suti. As long as they only practice it on members of their own tribes of course. It has to be culturally relative!
Hypocrisy in applying standards only where and when convenient – preferably to your own political advantage – is unforgivable. More, it is uncivilised. In fact it is one of the clearest signs of people working to undermine anything that could be called civilisation… again, usually for their own political advantage.
The only real test of a person’s political trustworthiness is whether they can recognise, and reject, hypocrisy. Those that recognise it, but take advantage of it, are scum. Those who fail to recognise it, are simply beneath contempt.
What a pity so many of them hold high office.
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