h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It wouldn't be so bad if he was entertainingly off topic, or if he ever talked about anything else. He has a hobby horse, and he will seize on any conversation on any subject and find some way to make it be about the things he's interested in. It becomes irritating.

Also, it would be very hard to take a single one of his posts and call it definitively racist, but once you've read a few of them a pattern does begin to emerge.

TRiG.

>>..a pattern does begin to emerge. <<

I don't see it myself. But then I'm sure there are those
who would come to the conclusion that I am a racist
homophobic if they read enough of my postings over
the years.

For me it's a matter of not falling into someone else's
pigeon hole definitions. It's so easy to toss off terms
like racist or homophobic. Like ancient charges of
witchcraft there really is no defense.

But it's not a position; more like a question of perspective.
Outlooks based on a lifetime of experience.

I am an old white male who objects to being called a
racist or a homophobe but I can see where some might
judge me for simply having a life of experience that
formed my opinions as those of an old white man.

Cass's biggest problem is his vast knowledge of History
as recorded and observed from so many points of view,
thus his ability to perceive patterns on a larger scale.

Gulliver had similar difficulties explaining things to
the people he encountered. It's all a question of scale
and perspective. (I'll stop short of saying Hitler had
some good ideas.)


~jwf~

The connection there was lampshades made from human skin.
Not Hitler's idea at all y'see; it was Jonathan Swift.

History is a profound teacher but you gotta understand
the antecedents.


~jwf~

it's also a finger-wagging "i know better than you" feeling that I get from them.

I'm sure that in those ginormous walls of text are some interesting words, but seeing one enormous post after another makes me not want to read them. So I don't. Which then renders an otherwise interesting thread useless and uninteresting for me.

And while it hasn't been happening much recently, I guess Cass is back from his jollies, so there will be more of it.

Well, we could always just talk about the topic in hand instead of letting ourselves be derailed? I admit, it can be irritating but we're not obligate to answer any one persons post. It's a fast moving thread, so we wouldn't be able to dedicate time to every single post even if we wanted to. I also skip over Cass' posts because I don't find them interesting, but others might do, and might be able to pick out the salient points for the rest of us to discuss.

I must admit I would find going topless outside of my own house a little difficult, but my back garden can be viewed from the cricket pitch at the end of the garden.

If I knew I had privacy, I'd probably not wear anything at all. I dislike clothes. There's nowt sexual about it. If anything, clothes, and the hiding of key areas, are what heighten sexual interest. A woman in a bikini is more attractive than a naked women, in some contexts.

Honest Iago wrote "The rest of the thread is about privacy and a womans right to do what she likes with her body".

Which may be true of this thread, but not of the actual issue that it raises.

The whole question of basic human rights and liberties as the foundation of collective life is a very Anglo-Saxon one- and perhaps H2G2 is an appropriate vehicle for a new kind of escapism from "the real world". "Carrying mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the Sun".

But to me it seems that the whole issue can not be divorced from the fact that in this case:
(a)Kate was topless in France where other posters have noted that toplessness and even nudity in public spaces is much more commmon and comfortable than in Britain- for reasons of the social and the actual climate.

(b) the pictures were published in a French magazine.

I have already written perhaps too much about French social attitudes. Recently I re-read "Love The French Way" (1961)which I read in translation in preparation for marrying into French society.

But HonestIago raises this Anglo Saxon idea of lawfully enforceable rights for all, and here we have another fundamental difference.

The basis of English Law was "common law" as understood by the common people, who were the ultimate judges of guilt or innocence, thus deciding the fate of their peers.

The French attitude to the law is rather different, and not unlike what Paderewski the great pianist, and then President of the newly-reborn Poland, said about disarmament, when arriving in the USA to attend the World Disarmament Conference. "Everybody thinks that disarmament is a good thing-- for the other fellow".

Hence French people believe that laws are a good thing and life will be fine if everybody else obeys the law, while they can be the one exception to the rule.

So the French court ruling on the photos of Kate will not be a "test case" of the principle of "a womans right to do what she likes with her body". Not least because this case and gossip magazines are "playing with fire". There is a tension and eternal conflict between Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: and the whole issue can not be divorced from the dangerous divisions that are weakening European society.

This applies particularly to France, where there has been much Media coverage based upon the fact that especially the South of France is now the playground of the super-rich, whose ostentation in this age of "bling" is quite outragious. A TV feature on yachts visited the yacht that the major builder (based I think in the Netherlands) gave his wife as an anniversary present. It cost him £40-60m. A Russian oil magnate gave his daughter the right to design her own for her 21st- and provided £30-40m. And if it is not yachts it is islands like that owned by Vanessa Paradis.

And, in fact, recent studies have shown that the French super-rich are in fact an hereditary caste, as if there had never been a revolution. So all of this embraces what I call "The Versailles Effect" in which the really "good life" involves "getting away from it all"-that is escaping from the world of the common people who are the basis for all this wealth that the rich enjoy.

So this may be just one more case, like the ongoing Betancourt case, in which some people will see the French legal system and "fat cat lawyers" being used to try to settle disputes among the rich and famous who live in "their own world" which seems largely immune from the world economic crisis and the massive unemployment.

And, of course, as programmes were saying before the 2008 financial troubles some of these individuals and the institutions that they front are now too important to the system for the system to be allowed to fail. Hence the huge crisis of debt in the developed world and the widespread austerity that is being imposed on the ordinary people in order to serve the financial interests of the wealthy by sevicing their loans.

Kate Middleton was supposed to be the example of how a commoner might rise to be a Queen but, as Lady Mary said in Downton Abbey the cry "You are not one of us", has its own pressures on those of us who try to build bridges and belong to a wider world.

Cass

"We are stardust, we are golden,
and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden."


I'll Eve it at that.

~jwf~

>>
casserole
1706, from Fr. casserole "sauce pan," dim. of M.Fr. casse "pan," from Prov. cassa "melting pan," from M.L. cattia, possibly from Gk. kyathion, dim. of kyathos "bowl, cup." Originally the pan, since 1958 also the dishes cooked in it.
<<

1958, eh.
That's getting into Julia Child territory.


~jwf~

OK, this is just getting too surreal now.

jwf

Someone from Belgium once told me on line that the word means the police in the Francophone parts- based on the saucepanlike hats, upside down...

Cass

Like casserole lions.


~jwf~

swl posted this very cool link elsewhere.
It's the map of Europe as it changes over 1000 years.
A very eye-opening overview of how things change
and yet remain the same. The more History you know
the more exciting it is. There's a period just before
German unification where everything in the middle is
in a state of flux. Tee-hee, I said flux.

http://www.wimp.com/presentday/

I wish it had a chronometer and some way to slow
it all down for closer study.


~jwf~

jwf

Now you are really inviting me to get myself into trouble..

So lets get back to Kate's boobs..

Of course a key interest at the moment is whether or not they are up to their key function (which is not ornamental) and whether this extended romantic tour of the Pacific will actually bear fruit, the Queen herself having extensively toured in places where people tend to "let their hair down". [I suppose people do breed on Anglesea? But being on 24 hour emergency call up is hardly conducive to an active sex life]

And what has this got to do with that phase of European History?

Well by the time of the Age of Revolution (1789-1848) it was pretty obvious that the Medieval ruling elite were suffering all of the ills of inbreeding, with the "Bad Blood" of the English royal family well-established and George III permanently insane for the last ten years of his reign.

The aristocracy were no better, famous for profligate wastrell sons who ruined their estates, and at least allowed the wealth to be accumulated by the rising middle class.

Middle classness was suited to small-to- middling states that they could manage like England, though England had now, for safety's sake in a dangerous old world, extended its government to include Scotland and Ireland.

But someone like Adam Smith could argue that it was the ideas and ambitions of the old monarchies and aristocracies that had promoted the wars that had bedevilled Europe. The "English" solution particularly associated with Lord Palmerston was to create a new Europe of small States based on progressive governments that lived to live in peace and co-prosperity with their neighbours.

And to this end the British Government supported the Latin American republics when they broke away from Spain, and also Greece, when it broke away from Turkey, and Belgium when it broke away from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.And (you are in Canada?) Lord Grey had sorted out the civil war in Canada and created its status as a self-governing dominion.

And in this new "Englizisation" of Europe, Britain could provide exactly the kind of monarchs that were needed. The Saxe-Coburgs were a pretty penniless and minor royal family living in the quiet remoteness, free from the problems of inbreeding. Queen Victoria's Mum thought that she had "hit the jackpot" when she married the heir to the British throne. Once her husband had died she thought of going back home.But her brother Leopold advised her against that, sending his genius adviser to help her through and to prepare her daughter for the possibility of becoming Queen of England.

Before that happened Leopold was offered the role of King of Greece and turned it down. He did accept Belgium. Subsequently the German Saxe-Coburgs and the British ones, Victoria and Albert, "did their bit" to ensure that all these new states could find monarchs of royal blood. But all this inter-related royalty could not cope with the politics of 1914.

But Lady Diana was a throw-back to the old aristocracy, her family having a long history of "serving" the monarchy in one way or another. Kate Middleton is a major injection of "new blood"- and has much to prove in the testing times ahead.

Cass

It may be just you and I left in this thread
but that's OK by me. I enjoy learning and
filling in the gaps.


Must confess I laughed out loud on day three
of the boobies photo scandal when footage had
the royal couple somewhere in Polynesia being
presented with flowered wreaths and shell necklaces
by clearly bare-breasted young native girls. The
royals smiled and bowed to allow these buxom but
somewhat vertically challenged natives to string
these around the royal necks.

Judging by the ambivalent and ironic looks from
both of the Royals I'd say the future of the
British monarchy is in good hands. The irony
would have reduced me to hysterics.

Up the empire!

~jwf~

jwf

Well back in the days of Empire it was part of "Geographical Determinism" that tropical climes encouraged a bit too much indulgence of various human appetites.. It was to some extent either an alternative or an integral part of Mu-beta's racialism- or my racism.

One explanation for the "backwardness" of people living "primitive lives" was that they had got so used to merely enjoying all the permitted fruits of God's "Garden of Eden" (JM's "Woodstock" is one of my favourite songs to perform)that they were quite content to follow the orders from on high to leave the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge alone. With so much animal desire the energy to "build a better world" was dissipated.

Beatrice Webb's grandfather had told her that getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden was the best thing that ever happened to humanity, otherwise they would have been still living "like pigs in an orchard." Beatrice and Sidney Webb were two of the major architects of Britain's Welfare State dedicated to producing new "Garden Cities of Eden" where the working classes could be penned up and fattened up "like pigs in an orchard" not really bothering with the Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge either.

Cass

I knew you'd see the connection between those lyrics
and the topless topic at hand. In fact we've really
only now gotten to the 'bottom' of the subject, IE: the
disconnect between the rising of the western industrial
whirled and the essential primitive nature of those who
are still in touch with the earth and their physical
presence in it.

We probably should also explore the Apollonian traditions
from early sunworship cults to very modern problems of
exposing our bodies to solar sourced skin cancers in the
name of beauty and enhanced sexual desirability.

In short, it is as always a question of finding the
middle road, compromise, moderation. Perhaps then
a bikini should be the recommended minimum coverage
allowed for women. Anything less of course must be
punished with public stoning. (Public stoning being
the best re-connect to Woodstock I can come up with
so early in this sun filled day. Time to spark up a
fat one and go wash some of my cars before they get
put away for the coming discontented winter.)


~jwf~

jwf

(a)I amused Peanut recently with something my older brother said, which is doubly, perhaps triply, appropriate to this thread. In a father of the bride speech he said that he had been told that a good speech should be like a Bikini, as brief as possible and covering three main points.. It was, of course, also the classic structure of the exam essay, if you add a brief introduction and conclusion.. I suppose this thread started out about "Monokinis" and ended up on "Monologues".

(b) Re that, in spite of, or perhaps because of, your kind words I did write a post on the "Look Who's Here" thread, only I had forgotten the "blip" in the working of my skin and lost it.

Funnily enough though it ended with more or less the point that you have made here. Do you know of Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception . Heaven and Hell". In writing it he drew on his illustrious Huxley "roots" in Biology to point out how Humanity seems to be losing touch with some of its most profound and valuable experiences because it has lost the "Winter experience". It may be a dull time, and depressing for some, but it is not that exhilerating 'other-wordly" exposure to Darkness and the Heavens. We now understand even more about the impact of light and darkness on brain chemistry. Huxley also described the winter experience of the Ancients in terms of food scarcity and hunger, and a radically different diet, largely based upon things like cereal and nuts. Food deprivation and fasting have a long experience with 'extra-sensory perception' and 'second sight', or with miracles like the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Knock Church (?) in the midst of the great Irish Famines.

Huxley's argument was that these revelations were true, and that Heaven and Hell are places that are real, though Modern Man, in emphasizing the upper brain and constructing a world that panders to its needs, repressing the lower brain as "animalistic" and "unworthy", is denying his ancestry and many of those things that have made it possible for Humankind to survive, as in the "primitive" societies that both Huxley and his great friend D.H.Lawrence studied and admired as more "fit to survive" than Modern Man.

Lawrence's novel "The Plumed Serpent" was adopted by British Fascists as a work that justified their campaigns: but Lawrence was dead by then, and I see nothing in his writing to suggest that he would have been sympathetic to such extreme Statism.

(c) Somehow I ended up with Joni Mitchell- probably because we now expect our economic system to ride roughshod over that natural experience. Few Christians really observe Lent, though I have known sensible and intelligent Muslims who believe that the fast of Ramadan really sets them up for the rest of the year.

"You don't know what you've got till its gone.
They've paved paradise so pull up a parking lot."

Cass

*grins at Cass* that was a great quote

and amusingly pertinent now , if we can laugh at oursleves also

which three points were we meant to cover

ontopic even, I am not particulary 'au fait' with the wearing of bikinis (or not)

does a bikini top count as two and thong bottom as one?

Ah Peanut so young!

Of course somehow the Bikini was a light-hearted reference to the Bikini Atol that was the site of probably the first test explosion of a Hydrogen bomb, I forget now just how many hundred times larger than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.. I just remember the front page of the Daily Mirror c 1955 that was taken up entirely with a new and more terrible mushroom cloud. The small Pacific chain of islands was the perfect place to destroy all life and then study the recovery, with the mutants produced by the exposure to radiation, as in the harvest of monstrous babies born to the pregnant women who survived the two bombs and the nuclear fall out.

As for the three points of the Bikini (the subject of a hit song "The Yellow-Dot" bikini) you only have to study the very sexually provocative dress of the Holywood Stars of that era of well-endowed "hour glass" figures to see that every attempt was made to take the male spectators' attention to the key primary and secondary sexual features, which were themselves well covered- the breasts, particularly the nipples, and the passage "down there" from which most of us had a "rite".

There was an interesting court case when the poster for a Jane Russell film was banned as being too indecent. Just too much cleavage leading the eye to forbidden fruits. The Studio's defence attorney employed high class mathematics boffins to use cutting edge Maths to compare the picture of Miss Russell with pictures of Marlene Dietrich, which the censors had passed.

The Maths proved that Miss Russell was in fact wearing more clothes than Miss Dietrich, exposing a smaller % of her "bossom" and keeping a larger % hidden.

But, in keeping with my allegedly racist comments, compared to those Sex Goddesses who were "out of touch out of reach"- in Cliff Richard's "Living Doll" tradition, actresses like Russell and Marilyn Monroe were held as firm as their corsetted grandmas. The shapes did not move or wobble. They had no life. So when people wanted real sexual excitement and hot passion it was French and Italian actresses like Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida who brought out a greater sexuality and sensuality of the female persona. Of course such women were better suited to stories about passion and disaster and hardship in far off and foreign places, unlike "Happy Days" USA.

As we are back in the Garden of Eden, Bardot's Eve in "And God Created Woman" took America by storm.

And getting back to intrusive photographs, Arthur Miller, who had by this time married MM, describes in his autobiography how a pack of US photographers saw MM out one day just as plain Mrs Miller and not fully in role as the Screen Godess.

They pursued her mercilessly as she tried to avoid them. This was of course around the time that Arthur Miller was in trouble with the Macarthy Commission that was looking for "Reds Under the Beds". MM dodged down one of those dustbin dead-ends that we see in so many films and collapsed like a hunted and cornered animal. The pack closed in and took their shots that cruelly exposed this vulnerable woman. The next day the pictures were over all the daily papers.

It was partly because of the way that the Millers were being savaged in the USA that they came to England to film "The Prince and The Showgirl", with Sir Lawrence Olivier taking personal charge to make sure that the British Press treated them with due respect.

Relating to posts between us earlier in the day:

In due course John Steinbeck and his wife also spent a couple of summers in England because Steinbeck wanted to write something based on the Arthurian legends. Thus was interested in visiting and staying near Glastonbury. He had befriended Robert Bolt, who taught in a boarding school down there, and Bolt found a cottage for the Steinbecks to rent for the second summer.

Steinbeck had felt an enduring sense of shame that he and other writers and artists had sat by and allowed "Artie" to take on and defeat Macarthyism all on his own. And he was fascinated by the view from Bolt's school over one of the Abbeys that had been closed down by Henry VIII during his Reformation.

I am convinced that the two writers must have often discussed Thomas More's story: and that their conversations shaped and inspired Bolt's play about More. The teaching film that I used to use, which included major parts of the film version of the play, featured various people over the years who had stood up against tyranny and arbitrary government; and the film itself was entitled "A Matter of Conscience".

Cass

As always so many salient points to which more
response ought to be forthcoming - not just from
me but so many others who used to enjoy this site.

But I am inspired by:
>>..in keeping with my allegedly racist comments <<
because I had not commented on those false accusations
hurled at you earlier and they ought to be challenged.

I should have at least pointed out the fuzziness with which
such a hate term is thrown about these days. Ironically, often
as a hate word even as one is accused of being a hater.

The point - ah yes the point - I was about to do a wander -
is that racism isn`t really applicable in a situation that is
merely comparing cultures within one racial group. In this
case the semi-naked snow-bathing suicidal Scandanavians
and the flesh-numbed non-deodorised unshaven French are both
considered of the same `Caucasian` race. Racism, in my opinion
should be between races not cultures or nationalities. At worst
you might be accused of cultural bias and at best credited with
good taste or a British perspective.


And now for those who hate long posts let me quote from
Dict.dot.com

>>
Caucasian
1.
Anthropology . of, pertaining to, or characteristic of one of the traditional racial divisions of humankind, marked by fair to dark skin, straight to tightly curled hair, and light to very dark eyes, and originally inhabiting Europe, parts of North Africa, western Asia, and India: no longer in technical use.

Word Story
Coined by German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach at the turn of the 19th century, the racial classification Caucasian has sparked plenty of debate in its short time in the English language. First there’s the issue of Blumenbach’s mistaken etymology: he erroneously placed the origins of the “White” race in the Caucasus mountain region. He also, not at all humbly, knocked his predecessor, Carl Linnaeus’ singular method of studying teeth to determine race, calling it “artificial” and asserting that it “came every day to be encumbered with more troublesome anomalies.” Blumenbach, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of studying the entire skull to understand the quandary that is race.

When anthropologists first started studying race, white supremacy was popularly accepted. Blumenbach was, at least, a bit more progressive than his contemporaries, in that he believe that all men belonged to the same species, even if he considered the Caucasian race—his own race—to be the original type and the “most handsome and becoming” of all five races = Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malayan, and American = in his now-outdated classification.

The language of race is undeniably a sensitive issue. Words that were once perfectly acceptable become dated and offensive. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, Bruce David Baum notes: “[T]he notion of a Caucasian race has gone in and out of vogue…in popular usage since it was invented in the late eighteenth century.” In a 2008 speech Hillary Clinton used the term “Caucasian,” however, the writers of the 2010 U.S. Census form opted to use the term “White” over “Caucasian” in the question about race. For most Americans, the terms are interchangeable. With that in mind, it’s probably best to choose your words carefully when in the presence of anthropologists.
<<


-jwf-