Haines? That name feels vaguely familiar, and besides the reptiles have put him at the top of the opinion section, however briefly, this day ...
Didn't the Bolter welcome him to the fold?
Indeed, indeed, there was Polonius prattling away, and why not a tremendously balanced mob like the IPA ...
And didn't the Windschuttle offer a Quadrant blessing?
Oh dear, how to fit in with all this talk of western civilisation?
Perhaps do a piece for The Spectator, concluding thusly?
And then, emboldened, why not do that piece for the reptiles this day ... even though that blather about Chinese hearts and Western minds sounds just like the sort of blather about identity that Haines mocks in his opening lines ...
Hang on, hang on, speaking of horse shit, as the pond often does, and the Four Horsemen of the postmodern Apocalypse, wasn't Carthage an attempt at a genocide?
Ben Kiernan here in pdf format might have got it wrong by calling it the first genocide - god Herself had managed a pretty nifty world-wide genocide in the old testament by way of flood - but it takes a pretty nifty shift of the scales to celebrate a Terence at the expense of all the other suffering poor sods ...
Of course, back in those days, it was all about race, gender, class and power, the Four Roman Horsemen of the Apocalypse ...
Same shit as it ever was ...
Now the pond could go on quoting, because in the end Cato was a piece of work, and the destruction of Carthage so that Terence might have a fine literary career seems a tad unbalanced, if not downright weird, and damn it all, we know it was all the fault of those luxuriant Greeks and their decadent ways ...
Same old horse shit as it ever was ...
Yes, the pond could go on quoting endlessly, but there's plenty more, with footnotes, to be found by following the link, and besides it's time to finish off with a final Haines' gobbet ...
With the pond's Latin too rusty, alas google translate failed with "equus equum stercore ne stercore scribimus nos aliena" when all the pond wanted as its motto was "we write horse shit, so no horse shit is alien to us..."
You see, the pond grew up being told it was different in every which way from the norm ... by way of class, religion, sex, nationality (bloody Irish) and any other form of abuse available in Tamworth (four eyed nerd) ...
At one time or another, we're all Carthaginians under the yoke of one kind of Rome or another ...
At one time or another, we're all Carthaginians under the yoke of one kind of Rome or another ...
The one redeeming feature the pond thought was okay at the time?
Why the pond was told that it was better than the Chinese restaurant owners across the road, and certainly better than the blacks isolated in the portable across the oval ...
Yes, at one time or another, we're all Carthaginians under the yoke of one kind of Rome or another ...
Why the pond was told that it was better than the Chinese restaurant owners across the road, and certainly better than the blacks isolated in the portable across the oval ...
Yes, at one time or another, we're all Carthaginians under the yoke of one kind of Rome or another ...
So when some bloody idiot whose blathered about Chinese hearts and western minds starts to rabbit on about western exceptionalism and civilisation - and never mind a couple of world wars and the holocaust and all the race and class and gender and power imbalances embodied in it - and carries on about sameness-in-diversity like a loon wanting to fit in with reprehensible reptiles, the pond is inevitably reminded of the current war being conducted by those determined to make minorities feel like unwelcome aliens in no need of equal rights ...
We all know about that particular bunch of ideological horsemen ...
And what better way to illustrate the point than to drag in a Pope cartoon, with more papal encyclicals on the current culture wars here ....
"If Hannibal had won, which he nearly did..."
ReplyDeleteWell, there's your problem right there, tiger. Despite his famous (operational) victories, Hannibal didn't come close to a (strategic) defeat of Rome, due to the latter's vastly superior...well, we'd call it the "military-industrial complex" these days. Anything that follows that error is the sort of teenage AltHist onanism so familiar from paragraphs starting "If Hitler had won, which he nearly did..." (donation to the Godwin Jar duly made).
Perhaps the bigger question is not whether Haines is enough of a street fighter, but if he knows enough about the subject he is supposed to be lecturing us all about. A cri de coeur, FFS? Vzzzt. Chremes asks his neighbour why he works so hard, in an Opus Dei, cilice kind of way (hence the title of the play), and when Menedemus tells him to mind his own business, Chremes says in effect "everything is my business". It is nothing more than a crutch for one man's inquisitiveness.
A bit of Greg Hunting (Latin Profanity), stercus was polite, so I'd say merda is what you are after (like shit, it is used metaphorically as well). So perhaps Merdam equinam scribimus, merdae equinae nihil a nos alienum puto. It pains me to butcher a favourite latin tag, but not as much as it pained me to read Haines' horse apples.
Oh, no Terence wouldn't have identified as "Berber" because the term didn't exist in his time. It was coined to distinguish native Romano-Africans from the Germanic Vandal invaders 500 years later. He would have identified as Afri, the indigenous people who lived in Tunisia and Libya before the Carthaginian invasion (and from whom we get the term "Africa"); and when I say would have, I mean did - when he was freed, he took the name Publius Terentius Afer.
DeleteBut WTF is that about "a free Terence in an unsubdued Carthage"? That, as Pauli put it, is "not even wrong". Before Terence was a slave in Rome, he was a slave in Carthage, because his mother was a slave in Carthage. Haines second last para is pure fallacious false dichotomy. Did I mention he clearly doesn't have a clue?
Oh dear, he seems like just the kind of man that a John Winston Howard would select to waste Ramsay's "bequest", and he shows every intent of doing just that.
DeleteBut at least Haines seems to be able to speak some kind of English, which is just about all that can be expected of a 'Professor of English' in a Chinese university.
It's good to have you aboard, FD, to help fill in the huge gaps in our (well, mine, anyway) general knowledge and education.