I realise using the Woke trope reveals me as an ageing right-winger, and the source of this link may do too. (I’ve never seen the site before, in fact, and picked up the story in ZeroHedge. It felt like the honourable thing to do to cite the original not the reprint.)
Once the writer has put the boot into Mao, olden days Bad Guy, the focus shifts to another of those reboots of popular culture, in this case Lord Of The Rings. Personally I thought LoTR was the greatest book ever ever ever when I was 15. I borrowed the three volumes one at a time from Hillbrow Library and then got my own copy of the film tie-in paperback and read it again, all in the same three weeks (ish). I may have read it once more but it was A Very Long Time Ago. So I guess what I’m saying is that I grew out of it 40 years ago <= snobby bitch alert.
The author speculates on how the new series might be scripted and acted, and this may or may not prove accurate. But there are some good points made about how a fluffed-up rainbow-bedecked world of Stronk Wahmen (really Young-Girls with jujitsu skills), plus photogenic folks of every possible sexuality, help to restructure how we see the Fogey Old World as past its Use By Date. Only the tired and depressed care about the Men Were Men (etc) Before Time now that the Equalitarianistas have taken over.
Now even muscly warriors with axes and Toxic Masculinity issues do have a sensitive side, and a nice supply of chai latte, and only a horrid reactionary spoilsport would not want to join in the fun.
Weird isn’t it how even ‘educated, literate’ USAmericans seem to have no idea at all of what the word ‘communism’ actually means. I think they mean ‘authoritarianism’ - but that is bit longer; seven syllables just too much to ratiocinate in the New World, perhaps?
That was the one @PatB, yes. At the time we lived nearby though I can’t quite recall if it was in Caroline Street (very nearby) or Barnato Street (about a mile further down the same road, where we moved next). That house is now a tuck shop (fast food plus basic groceries) - or was the last time Google drove by.
I have no real recollections of my childhood, but I grew up a few miles down the road in Observatory. All I remember about Hillbrow is the smoke filled snooker hall where I spent too much of my wasted youth. My family had some good friends who were under 24 hour “house arrest” in one of the Hillbrow high rises. The area also features prominently in the celebrated escape of a couple of anti-apartheid activists.
At those times in South Africa, there were two classes of “house arrest”. Twelve hour and twenty four hour. One was placed under house arrest by decree of the state and once served your arrest order, you had to confine yourself to your own home. There was no trial or appeal process. Perhaps some comparisons to modern times? From the book Memory Against Forgetting:
"In October 1962, my own house arrest order arrived. It had been signaled in advance by the Minister of Justice in a speech in Parliament in which he sought to justify such orders. … House arrest permitted me to leave the house only between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays; not at all on weekends of public holidays. I had to report to police head-quarters at Marshall Square every weekday between 12 and 2 p.m. I was not to enter any school or industrial premises, or leave the magisterial district of Johannesburg. I was not to receive any guests at home or communicate with any other banned or listed person, except - by bizarre dispensation - my own wife. … Special Branch men would arrive at any hour of the evening , demanding to be allowed in to prowl around and check that I was home, and not ‘receiving guests’. … They arrived again one evening when my daughter Toni was entertaining some friends in the living-room. I was by myself in the kitchen. They took the names and addresses of all the teenage visitors and the next day their parents were visited by police … Many of her friends no longer came near our house. … I was banned from ‘gatherings’ but who knew what constituted a ‘gathering’? Lawyers suggested it could be two or more people ‘with a common prpose’. A queue waiting for a bus? An audience at a cinema? No one knew the answers. I was not to ‘communicate’ with any other banned or listed person. But what is ‘communicating’? A nod of recognition in the street? A wave of the hand? Answering a telephone call? … "
Thanks @Evvy_dense for asking me this. I had never thought about the parallels of South Africa over half a century ago and lockdowns by decree, no appeal, no regard for human consequences, and the many for whom injustice was (and now is) completely invisible.
Like the “NAZIS” who promote the use of fluoride, municipal waste incineration, nuclear power (et.al) all endocrine disrupting all representing threats to chromo-somatic structure…
Like JK I have huge reservations but unlike JK I don’t blame the victims…like I don’t blame kids who use WiFi…if only the anti-woke brigade would focus on the problem…instead, like the doctors whose actions they ostensibly oppose, they concentrate on consequences not causes…look if you’ve been castrated and take feminising hormones how much of a threat are you in a ladies toilet? It’s only convention that splits up the sexes for toileting anyway. No the threat dears is from all the unconsidered spewing of endocrine disrupting “enviro-toxins” (Dr. Vyvyan Howard).
JK’s Twitter feed is full of how we must support and protect Iranian women (I have friends in Isfahan), all well and good but does this neo-liberal criticise the philosophy of exploitation and intervention that isolates Iran from the international community? “A physician must also always be concerned with causes”. We must remove the pump handle…not treat the cholera after it has been contracted…(unless our own stupidity has left us with no choice), not to do so exemplifies some of the very worst forms of neoliberalism.
Sure is a small world. Although I continued to attend the school in Houghton with the green blazers, we moved out to the East Rand (euphemism for Alberton) in about 1986. I have a sister who still lives in that area, another in Fourways.
