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QUOTES OF THE WEEK
The first is from Iraqi-Australian water engineer Hassan Janabi, recently returned to Iraq to help rebuild his homeland, during an interview with George Negus:
GEORGE NEGUS: How bad has it been for you personally, because, for those of us observing from afar it looks worse than ever at the moment. The violence has been on the increase since the election 700 people killed in the last month alone. It looks like a hell on earth.
HASSAN JANABI: It is a little less than a hell. I think it was a hell under Saddam.
Our second quote star is Associate Professor Judith Armstrong, a fellow of the Contemporary European Research Centre at Melbourne University. In Friday’s Age, Judith was all upset about recent EU voting patterns:
After the Republican triumph in the last US election, and the feeling that democracy was tumbling downhill towards some lowest common denominator, many began looking towards Europe to provide an alternative to US cultural domination.
But things didn’t turn out as Judith had wished:
In the event, a clear majority of the supposedly civilised French and Dutch populations have put fear and self-protection ahead of global balance.
Selfish monsters! They don’t deserve democracy:
If, as the adage goes, education is wasted on the young, it is tempting to wonder whether democracy is not wasted on voters.
Judith isn’t exactly young, but her education sure has been wasted. A water engineer is smarter.
(Via Attila the Pun and J.F. Beck; Armstrong also attracts the attention of Professor Bunyip.)
UPDATE. Several readers note Armstrong’s use of the phrase “education is wasted on the young”; never heard it myself, either, but it turns up more often than you’d expect. Reader Steve endured Armstrong’s attempts at education in the ‘80s, and ForNow examines the woman’s credibility as a Russian literary expert.
Last year, U.S. author and social critic Jeremy Rifkin wrote a best-selling book called “The American Dream” in which he predicted that the EU’s vision of the future would quietly eclipse the United States’.
“Lowest common denominator”?
Oh wait, that’s right: those darned proles and peasants just won’t vote the way their self-proclaimed betters want them too.
I’m really broken up by that. Sincerely. *snicker*
Posted by Patrick Chester on 2005 06 03 at 01:56 PM • permalink...supposedly civilised…
Huh? This sounds like the “stoooopid Red Stater” mentality schtick last November. God, lefties hate losing, and REALLY hate being wrong, don’t they?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 03 at 02:01 PM • permalinkI think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone describe the EU as “ultra-democratic” while keeping a straight face. At least I presume she kept a straight face and wasn’t giggling uncontrollably as she typed those words.
Posted by Randal Robinson on 2005 06 03 at 02:05 PM • permalinkThe link to Judith isn’t working, but this one worked for me: http://www.austlit.com/a-list-a-e.html (scroll down a bit)
She’s clearly old enough to remember the revelations of the horrors of Hitler, Stalin, Mengistu, Mao, and Pol Pot. As an associate lit professor in research on contemporary Europe, she should know of those things, hm? She obviously pays some sort of attention to her own appearance, as compared, for instance, to Margo K, but not such a distracting amount as to leave her in ignorance of the past century’s events. What kind of monster wants to strip Europeans of democracy simply because the Europeans won’t vote for “global balance,” i.e., won’t put above all their more serious concerns the solidifying of an EU as a counterweight to the USA?
In the Australia Humanities Review at http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/emuse/russian/armstrong.html, she said ”...so much time was spent by so many Americans in recent years trying to undermine a so-called threat to world peace that simply went away all by itself.”
She’s a ditzy globo-commie. The Soviet Union, for her, was no threat, but the USA, uh oh!! Judith, stick to your Tolstoy, your Dostoevsky, and your hair care.
Isn’t the old adage ‘Youth is wasted on the young?’
I have never heard it with ‘Education’
Posted by Kosmopolit on 2005 06 03 at 02:37 PM • permalinkIs it really tempting to wonder, Judith? Or is one simply distancing oneself from one’s opinions by not saying, “I think democracy is wasted on voters?” Or, perhaps, is one just trying to sound refined and intellectual by using the third person indefinite, instead of just writing how one speaks? Here’s an example one may be tempted to consider: “Judith, I think you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are, and even further from smart enough to be able to advise us on how we ought to vote, govern ourselves, or even decide on which take-out to get tonight on the way home.”
I posted a long one about Judith on the wrong thread here at Tim’s. Sorry! I Googled up some interesting things that she said when she was taken in by a phony-Ukrainian novelist Helen Darville a.k.a. Helen Demidenko. Russian lit expert Armstrong apparently mistook, for the voice of the great Russian literary tradition, the voice of modern Eastern European fascism.
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/crucial_cultural_battleground_dominated/#45995
The professoriate never strove all-out for the consistency and repeatability, the reliability in processes, which the practically and productively knowledgeable seek naturally enough, but additionally the political professoriate (especially the humanities) has thrown away quite a bit of traditional stuff about aspiring to reality-based structural solidity and integrity of their ideas; it’s ironic that the post-modernists and their fellow travelers’ political alliance now calls itself the “reality-based community.”
OK so we have now established that Judith Armstrong hears voices - Stalin.
He must be chuckling, useful idiots continue on all his good work.
I like the bit about the “lowest common denominator”, not-so-young Judith must be horrified at the thought of sharing her vote with all those uneducated, uncivil and uncouth yobbos. Come the revolution the Judiths of the world will be running the re-education camps, comrades.
Judith Armstrong was my Russian Literature & Society lecturer in my first year at uni, way back in 1986 - basically at the beginning of glasnost and perestroika. Back then, she was convinced that Gorbachev was a fraud (correct, but not for the reasons she thought), glasnost and perestroika were flashes in the pan (ditto, mostly), and the 21st century would be the Soviet Century.
If you think she was bad, the tutor was a guy called John Jirik, who downright detested Gorbachev and regarded Alexander Solzenitsyn as a traitor. I heard of him a few years later when he was in Moscow covering the uprising of the Russian Duma (under Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoi) against Boris Yeltsin. For which media agency was John covering this momentous event - none other than CNN (the American al Jazeera)!
The woman is both incorrect and unlettered. The quote is, “Youth is wasted on the young.”
And money is wasted on SMH payrolls…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 06 03 at 08:40 PM • permalinkAnd here I always thought the lowest common denominator of democracy was lawful government by the majority. Given her subsequent quote about democracy being wasted on voters, it’s certainly obvious why she has a problem with that lowest common denominator.
BTW, how did she manage to be only an Associate Professor at age 70?
OT, but have to vent.
Mike Carlton wrote a paragraph appearing to berate the unfair treatment Corby got, and then said he was referring to David Hicks, and referred to Corby hysteria.
While some merely think Corby is guilty, others are positively relishing the fact that Corby has been unfairly treated, regarding it as a way to get back at Howard and Bush, just like some who rejoiced over Schiavo being killed as a way to get back at Bush (a vocal minority of those who supported Schiavo being killed, in fairness to the pro-killing group).
in fairness to the pro-killing group
Wha…?, That’s not a phrase I ever thought I’d read.
*boggled*
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2005 06 03 at 11:01 PM • permalink#5 ” She obviously pays some sort of attention to her own appearance…”
Not at all. This is obviously an old studio head shot with extensive use of the smart blur filter.
Posted by walterplinge on 2005 06 03 at 11:17 PM • permalink“...he predicted that the EU’s vision of the future would quietly eclipse the United States’.”
Well, sure, the EU’s vision of the future is superior to ours. They’ve got visions of superpower status, clean air, renewable energy, superb cradle-to-grave healthcare and tons o’ vacation time. Our vision of the future involves working hard, taking personal responsibility for our individual welfare, getting a nice house, getting a nice car we can afford the payments on, and not getting hit with a suitcase nuke.
Their vision kicks ass compared to ours. Reality will be substantially different.
Was that a way for Rifkin to weasel out of his inevitable wrongness, or just pisspoor writing and lazy editing?
in which he predicted that the EU’s vision of the future would quietly eclipse the United States.
a three-second analysis of the EU’s demographics would have dispensed of that idea. talk about retarded
Posted by benson swears a lot on 2005 06 04 at 04:44 AM • permalinkWell, at least now EVERYONE can hate the French.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 06 04 at 05:56 AM • permalinkI’m shattered.
What are our lefties coming to?
Not one single “hegemony” or “globalisation” to be seen.Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 06 04 at 08:43 AM • permalinkDoes this woman really mean to suggest that Republicans were the least common denominator in our 2000 elections? As if the vote was really split between Democrats and the Green Party, but everyone reluctantly settled on Republicans as some sort of unhappy compromise between those great warring factions?
This would strain credulity if she was talking about the 2000 election; when discussing 2004 it’s simply untrue. But I don’t think that’s what she was trying to say, because I don’t think she has any idea at all what a least common denominator is.
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it is tempting to wonder whether democracy is not wasted on voters.
A perfect summation of academe’s regard for the common man. Absolutely perfect.