Today's daily chat...
Quote:It's "green supremacy" we should fear
UPDATE 04AUG25: good jeans AND guns? OK, I’m sold.
Indonesia, like many post-colonial nation-states, is a hodge-podge of cobbled-together peoples and cultures whose borders were arbitrarily drawn for the convenience of foreign powers.
To an outsider, Indonesia looks like a fairly homogenous monoculture, where a bunch of identical short people with black eyes and hair all speak the same language and live in peace and harmony. Au contraire.
Indonesia is a mish-mash of over 300 cultures, each with distinct languages, religions, traditions, costumes, food, and music. Even within groups like Jawa, there are the halus (smooth) and kasar (rough), and subgroups within those, such as my adopted Tegal.
Overlaid on the aboriginal cultures are Indian, Chinese, Arab, Portuguese, British and Dutch imprints left by past colonization and subjugation. The national language, known as Bahasa Indonesia, is chock full of words borrowed from other languages, much like English.
And through all of this, like the brilliant Tom Lehrer song says, everyone hates each other, with ancient prejudices infusing all layers of society.
So when I hear people lambasting “white culture,” I have to laugh at the sheer ignorance, and in the case of white folks who do this, the pathological self-hatred on display.
Anyone who’s ever been to Europe or lives there knows that there is no such thing as “white culture” or even ‘white people”. Germans are as different from Italians from Spaniards from Swedes. They look different, speak differently, have unique traditions and histories, and they all hate each other. That hardly sounds like a homogenous monoculture.
There’s not even a single group with “white” skin. Gingers and albinos might come close, but the rest of the continent runs the gamut of ruddy red, golden tan, coffee brown, and green olivine. Just within the island of England, there are dozens of incomprehensible dialects and subcultures that all look down on each other. Across the US, each state has its own unique culture and dialect, with dozens of subcultures across the innards.
There is no discernable “white culture”. Nazis were a political party 100 years ago, and “white supremacy” could only exist if albinos attempted to conquer the planet.
There are several reasons why European cultures have dominated global civilization for several centuries. The first is ancient Greek philosophy and art. The second is the Roman church’s maniacal push to catalogue the planet as its singular possession. The third was European appropriation of Arabic numbers and maths, but to be fair this was the fault of Hugalu Khan and the Mongols (great band name).
Since Greeks are olivine skinned, we can say that the domination of Western civilization started with “green supremacy,” something Kermit the Frog should be proud of. The Roman church is based on a religious movement that started in the Middle East. Both Italians and Levantine people are olive skinned, thus enforcing “green supremacy”. Europe’s appropriation of Arabic mathematics was predicated on invasion by golden brown people into Bagdad, which was full of olivine people. No white faces to be found here, either.
What we are left with are calendars, English, and McDonald’s. Are Europeans evil for inventing a calendar that is one of the most accurate on the planet? Is it Europe’s fault that English is the simplest of European languages, and that all the important discoveries and industrial updates have been published in English for the past two centuries? Is it Europe’s fault that Americans invented mass production and the Repeatable Experience?
Folks need to disabuse themselves of the idea that there are monolithic cultures built around skin tone. Go to Africa for any amount of time and you will find no “black culture”. Hang out in Asia for a while and you will never find a “yellow culture”. This oversimplification of skin tone is an insult to the thousands of unique cultures that have all had their contributions to global civilization.
So, about this Sweeney chick.
Sweeney is a Gaelic name, Mac Suibhne, which means “pleasant” or “easy going”. The Sweeney chick looks both pleasant and easy-going. The name also implies Irish ancestry, and the Irish have never invaded anyone. In fact, Ireland’s contributions to the world — great literature, outstanding whisky, and a fun holiday — have been adopted globally, not forced. Thus, I hardly think the Sweeney chick is a supremacist of any kind.
So, what all this boils down to is yes, the Sweeney chick has nice genes and fills out her jeans quite well. Anyone having fits over the Sweeney chick’s ad campaign is clearly a nut job and needs to tweak their meds. She’s obviously an attractive young woman making a decent living off of her natural assets, and this should make the Feminazis happy in any case.
As for the rest of us, we should be relieved that we don’t have to look at fat people in bikinis any more, and given the overabundance of black and brown people over the past few years, it’s nice to see a peach-colored face in the public square.
The upshot of all this is…give it a rest. Stop with the racial and cultural hatred and self-loathing. Remember it was the Greeks and Persians who gave us geometry and algebra, and thus bear all the blame for “green supremacy”.
And now, on to something more interesting.
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Today’s cinematic offering is The Mongol (2007), a Mongolian-Russian co-production about the early life of Genghis Khan. It’s well written and shot, and fairly historically accurate, though it was part of a series that never materialized. Maybe you’ll want to double feature it with one of the worst film ever made — The Conqueror (1956), with John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. Hollywood at its finest.
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – Thomas Sowell