tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post113819730252305401..comments2024-03-25T19:48:24.624+11:00Comments on Oz Conservative: Ignatieff's lesson from the cryptUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-1138274642235845972006-01-26T22:24:00.000+11:002006-01-26T22:24:00.000+11:00Stackja, it seems to me your father's parents were...Stackja, it seems to me your father's parents were representative of most of the Irish who came to Australia.<BR/><BR/>Mark, well argued. I don't see how a liberal could make a principled reply to your case.<BR/><BR/>I have only ever come across three instances in which the principle of denying unchosen, inherited forms of connection was applied to families. None of these three cases worked out well.<BR/><BR/>The first is Professor Peter Singer, who used to argue that we are morally obliged to spend our money helping poor strangers rather than our own family if that would create greater utility.<BR/><BR/>Then Professor Singer's mother got sick. He did the right thing and spent much of his money providing her with nursing help. But when journalists asked why he was acting against his own principles, he was unable to reply.<BR/><BR/>The second is Germaine Greer, who in her book The Female Eunuch, argued that babies should be raised collectively on farms, with parents helping to raise all the children, so that the children might not even know who their "womb mother" was.<BR/><BR/>But by 1991 Greer had changed her mind and she complained that whereas "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds mother and child" this was decreasingly so in the West with "our families having withered away" and with relationships becoming "less durable every year".<BR/><BR/>But the political moderns who made the most radical attempt to drive things to the logical end point were the Russian Bolsheviks.<BR/><BR/>The Bolshevik spokeswoman on the family, Alexandra Kollontai, wrote soon after the Revolution that,<BR/><BR/>"in the new state there will be no more room for such petty divisions as were formerly understood: These are my children, to them I owe all my maternal solicitude, all my affection ... Henceforth, the worker-mother, who is conscious of her own social function, will rise to a point where she no longer differentiates between yours and mine ... The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family."<BR/><BR/>Of course, it didn't work. By Stalin's time there were awards for women raising their own large families.<BR/><BR/>And yet, as you say, if liberals were to be consistent, then they should make preferencing one's own family illegitimate for the same reason they have rejected an identification with one's own ethny.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-1138251070250457962006-01-26T15:51:00.000+11:002006-01-26T15:51:00.000+11:00Outstanding post. It evoked the growing feelings ...Outstanding post. It evoked the growing feelings I have myself of a desire for a tie to a place that is the place of my people, protected from those who would desecrate their graves and so on.<BR/><BR/>Perhaps another way of arguing against this idea that "citizenship is all about who is in and who is out" and should thus be eliminated, is to say that if you take that idea to its logical conclusion, you have to advocate the elimination of families as well. Because if allowing mere blood ties to decide who is "in" and who is "out" is verboten, then really a family should be required to allow any stranger who walks up to their door to come in and join the family. It's interesting that liberals have such scorn for the concept of the ethnic nation, yet I don't think most of them are completely comfortable with the idea of doing away with the family. And really there is little difference between a family, an extended family, and one's ethnic group, who are simply cousins. <BR/><BR/>Of course if you go back far enough, all human beings are cousins. But it does definitely matter how distant the blood relationships are. I have loyalty first to my family, because they are closest kin. Next, to my extended family. Next, to my people. Next, to my nation, which includes many different peoples. And finally, to my species. This is not an arbitrary and unimportant distinction either. Liberals want us to ignore all sense of a tie to one another except at the humanity-wide level - which would have to mean eliminating the family as something important as well as eliminating the importance of the ethnic group.MnMarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01110007186831549266noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-1138233757190486502006-01-26T11:02:00.000+11:002006-01-26T11:02:00.000+11:00My late father's parents were born in Ireland, but...My late father's parents were born in Ireland, but he thought of himself as Australian, with Irish memories to be reminded of, as he got with his life in Australia.stackja1945https://www.blogger.com/profile/06950209922917136207noreply@blogger.com