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| Rush at the station |
Their efforts to protect the heritage of Camberwell have drawn fire from a leading architect, Professor Kim Dovey. According to Dovey, people who resist modernity are ... well, racists and whatnot:
Melbourne University academic Kim Dovey has also accused some residents of trying to defend their patch from ethnic and class differences.
"There's an element of 'well, we're not racist, we welcome different kinds of people as long as they behave exactly the same as we always have," Prof Dovey said yesterday...
Prof Dovey said Rush had dramatised the issue by making people feel if they accepted change "they would be giving up something of themselves".
So bad luck if you feel attached to your lovely, green, historic suburb. According to Professor Dovey you're not allowed to try to conserve it for yourself or your children. If you do try, you're just resisting modernisation/globalisation and must be a racist. And Professor Dovey gets even more Orwellian. You're not even allowed to think, as your suburb gets transformed, that you're giving up something of yourself - that too is a forbidden thought.
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteCould fighting over-development be made an issue for traditionalist activists?
Not many contenders in that field currently, the Greens couldn't care less about anything outside Zone 1 of the train lines. Could be a good way to start a grass roots campaign, especially in your area where people are so finicky about their trees and greenery.
Assuming that Dovey is a leftist, his sniffing at the idea that residents of changed neighborhoods have given up a part of themselves is very odd. It is an essential doctrine of the left that an individual has no identity beyond his social relations, so to change those social relations is necessarily to change that identity. Dovey knows that these people have lost something, he just thinks the new social relations (and identity) they've been given is better. If they disagree, it just shows that they're bad people who need planners like Dovey to arrange their lives and landscapes.
ReplyDeleteIt is individuals like Dovey - and the Australian and New Zealand PMs - who make sure Anglo-Celtic Australia and Anglo-Celtic New Zealand haven't got a dog's chance.
ReplyDeleteBut behind them are are "the business community". Greed, globalism, Asianisation and constant upheaval and constant change. All to financially enrich the "business community", while the only enrichment Anglo-Celts are allowed is multi-racialism and multi-culturalism - along with the concrete slab buildings.
Both Australia and New Zealand needed some kind of Swiss binding voter's veto a long time ago in order to preserve the established identity - both nationally and locally. Roots, even including our villages and leafy suburbs, are important.
Could fighting over-development be made an issue for traditionalist activists?
ReplyDeleteWhere I live in the USA, it is the party-line PC leftist idiots who are always in a lather about "over-development".
Where I live in the USA, it is the party-line PC leftist idiots who are always in a lather about "over-development".
ReplyDeleteAnon, it's true that the left do also interest themselves in such issues. But I don't think we should take the line that "the left supports x, therefore we oppose x".
We have to take it on a case by case basis. If there is an area of low quality housing that is going to be redeveloped, then great.
But if people feel connected to a suburb because it is full of beautiful heritage buildings, then why would traditionalists not support reasonable proposals for conservation?
If you are Caucasian and breathe the air of your own home upon waking, you are a racist.
ReplyDeleteIf you are Caucasian and dress before you leave for work, you are a racist.
If you are Caucasian and were born via either c-section or traditional delivery, you are a racist.
The word has been so abused that it is now effectively meaningless. I don't even hear it anymore.
ReplyDeleteAnon, it's true that the left do also interest themselves in such issues. But I don't think we should take the line that "the left supports x, therefore we oppose x".
Exactly correct. The leftists who ostensibly value the wilderness and oppose development are the same ones who wish to open our Southern border and allow the massive influx of a people who don't give a damn about the wilderness. The great Edward Abbey wrote a hilarious send-up of these good folks in his novel Hayduke Lives!.
What is the lesson learned from this? Liberalism is necessarily incoherent. It values contradictory things and survives only because of the innate stability of the states it infects. If, as Mark says, we oppose everything liberals do not out of principle but because liberals do it, we are allowing the enemy to set the terms of the engagement.
You should see what they're doing to Brisbane ... no longer just a charming, if large, country town, the elites have decided that Brisbane shall become Australia's new "world city".
ReplyDelete""Anon, it's true that the left do also interest themselves in such issues. But I don't think we should take the line that "the left supports x, therefore we oppose x".""
ReplyDeleteThe reason the left are usually the activists involed in anti-development is because the left has an activist culture and the various "rights" in Australia do not even have a marginal one.
Taking back campaigns against over-development and making them something identified not just with the left would be useful.
It is an issue ordinary people that usually don't give a damn about politics can get quite heated on.
Anon, it's true that the left do also interest themselves in such issues. But I don't think we should take the line that "the left supports x, therefore we oppose x".
ReplyDeleteThat may not always be the case, but that's the way to bet.
if people feel connected to a suburb because it is full of beautiful heritage buildings, then why would traditionalists not support reasonable proposals for conservation?
It depends on your feelings about private property. My feeling is that the owner of the property should decide. Around here (again in the USA) the Leftists who yap about "preservation" have no financial stake in what's being preserved. They want to "preserve" with other people's money. My view is that when you "preserve" an old property and thus prevent someone from building a more profitable (to them) newer property, then you are taking their property from them by force and should compensate them accordingly.
If there is an area of low quality housing that is going to be redeveloped, then great.
Around here, when they want to redevelop "low quality housing" the Left always insists that the redevelopment include "affordable housing" (i.e., property set aside for troublesome minorities). Oftentimes this represents no improvement over the existing situation from my perspective.
The left isn't against "overdevelopment", it's against development not as prescribed by the left. The left loves super-dense, pack people like sardines development. They hate single-family homes.
ReplyDeleteTyrants have always favoured foreigners over the native population of the country or countries on which they've imposed their rule. The foreigners are more likely to be sympathetic to the tyrant who has brought them in. They become a favoured class who can be relied upon to oppose the interests of the native-born. "Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, & lives with them & invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the others enter into no rivalry with him." This is from Aristotle's politics written 2,300 years ago. He also writes of how the tyrant gives women licence, which explains government advocacy of feminism. Modern tyrants have however accomplished something which ancient tyrants could only dream of. They've found a way to make the masses love their servitude, or at the very least not go to any great lengths in attempting to throw it off. They've managed to short-circuit so to speak, the natural reaction against unjust rule by inducing a false sense of guilt in those who would resist. If you don't like having a mob of mahometans move into your neighbourhood your a racist, how shameful. If you insist that women should stay in the house & raise children, you're a horrible sexist who lives only to reduce women to an abject slavery. Much better that they become wage-slaves. Then the family, which constitutes a major obstacle to the creation of a perfect Marxist society can be destroyed. Political correctness acts rather like a spider's venom. It paralyzes the spider's prey so he can enjoy devouring his victim at leisure. Doing away with its baleful influence is extremely difficult if not impossible at this point due to the greater part of the last several generations having had their minds warped if not outright destroyed in the state "schools". Only God & His Most Holy Mother can help those who remain faithful at this hour.
ReplyDelete