Thanks so much for making me read this, zot. sure, it’s a good looking site, but…
“I’m glad,” I told him, “that people like you and Bob Santamaria were around to fight against communism.”
Now, i wouldn’t mock this young man’s love for his grandfather, and i empathise with his loss, but this comment is laughable for so many reasons.
And it’s followed by:
A few months earlier weÂ’d had another conversation, where I told him how IÂ’d changed my mind about socialism, that IÂ’d realised how its proponents didnÂ’t tolerate dissent. He was so weakened by illness that our conversation couldnÂ’t last long enough for me to tell him that it was also because I finally realised that government interference in economic matters was inconsistent with my uncompromising insistence on maximum personal freedom (provided that oneÂ’s actions do not infringe anotherÂ’s right to self-determination). I didnÂ’t get to tell him how a colleagueÂ’s argument that to achieve socialism (a thing this colleague desires) we would have to abolish individual subjectivity, fills me with horror.
Again, not to mock his obvious grief for his grandfather, or his love for this man. But hell, i am mocking his politics. And i’m certainly mocking his turn of phrase, his knowledge of cultural studies and ‘knowledge’ of film. In the stupidest blog entry ever he writes in a review of the film japanese story (which i didn’t much care for either, but that’s not really the point):
The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.
This imbecile is teaching at unimelb?
Check his IQ: top zillion percentile. Says so right there, under ‘skills’ in his resume. I want to marry this guy.
No wonder unimelb shat me. I have only this to say:
Australian films which do not feature the outback (that i can remember):
‘Death in Brunswick’
‘strictly ballroom’
‘dark city’
‘ghosts of the civil dead’
‘children of the revolution’
i could go on and on and on… and i’d like to say to this misinformed fool: you need to get some australian cinema up you, cultural studies boy.