Porn and Liquor Made Them Do It!

Ridwan blogs about Prime Minister Howard’s latest attempt to “save” the Australian Aboriginal population:

Luckily, Australia is led by a ‘great-white’ leader who has a plan to save the Aboriginal from extinction. Prime Minister John Howard, the Grand-Wizard of Australian racism, wants Aboriginals to live beyond their pathological destructiveness.

According to the BBC, the benevolent Howard has decided to ban alcohol and pornography in almost all of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal communities. And, to show that he is serious, he is going to use the police and the military to protect the Aboriginals from themselves.

What a great plan hey? Ignore all the destruction of racist colonialism and instead blame the Aboriginals for not living up to the wonders of white civilization. And, typically forget the fact that Australia stands on the backs of those who once walked everywhere without the paternalism that now reduces them to no more than children.

Identity Politics

In a post on Slant Truth about identity politics Thinking Girl blogs:

Relativism is thrown out when someone wants to derail a discussion. It’s the philosophical equivalent of trolling, if you ask me! Relativism is supposedly about giving equal weight to all points of view, cultural contexts, systems of social organizing, etc. Which, to many, sounds fine and dandy. But in reality, what this does is quite similar to totalization, because it ignores relations of power. One can’t claim to have a view from nowhere, and one can’t claim to have a view from everywhere, either. We are all of us steeped in our own contexts; we cannot simply escape them or set them aside, not ever – and we can’t simply adopt another viewpoint or context just like that. Just as we can’t claim to inhabit a neutral position, we also can’t claim to inhabit every position equally. It’s an epistemological limitation.