Saturday, 8 August 2009

Nemesis

Hoody no more?

'Hero' Greek woman sets fire to drunken Briton's genitals

Via Mark Steyn, this little slice of inspiration - that the original homeland of Western civilisation still has some spirit, pride, and back bone...against us demoralised, degraded, and collectivized 'British.'
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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, well, the whole thing is just cobbled together from a string of cliches. Those Cretans, they aren't just 'proud', they are, of course, 'fiercely proud'. It is an utter impossibility, you see, for Johnny Foreigner to be 'gently proud' or 'dignifiedly proud'.

That wasn't any kind of writing, it was a kind of verbal pebble-dashing.

Most of us, I imagine, are ashamed at the bahaviour of some Britons abroad. I really don't know what should be done about that: those who indulge in it seem to be proud of their decadence. But to hint, as that article does, that being maimed by the locals is, somehow, deserved merely panders to the worst kind of 'serves 'em right' narrow-mindedness.

8 August 2009 at 13:41
James Higham said...

Of course, he then reserves the moral right to slug her one.

8 August 2009 at 16:58
Goodnight Vienna said...

Beautiful pic there. O/t I'm unclear about #culturewarstheculture day on Monday. Is it just one post for Monday or is it, as JuliaM suggested, one snippet per day for a week?

8 August 2009 at 21:48
North Northwester said...

Edgar, you have two points, and maybe the Telegraph's tone is a little patronising. Or a lot. I won't argue that point with you. You may very well be right.
However, I have to my embarrassed surprise discovered in recent years that I am in fact not a libertarian at all but a conservative. Once, I might have solved the libertarian dilemma of whether his right to the freedom of expression by which he waved his Gordon in her face was trumped by her right not to be offended. And back in the day I would have decided according to property rights that the bar's owners alone should decide whether willy-waving was OK or not and concluded that if it was fine by them, then she should choose to leave - possibly with a refund of her round of drinks if she'd not been made aware that obscenity in the house rules.
Now I think that such accounts are inadequate, and so my opinion (if that's not too strong a word) of this case is more based on customary ideas of right and wrong and the rightness of things, and of the settled laws and practices that derive from them - or which generate them [if you're big into Hayek you'll be very familiar with the difference.]
It's pretty clear from context that flashing isn't just a cute local variation of karaoke, and that the brutish Brit was wrong - by custom and possibly in law too. I'd imagine so in a Greek Orthodox country.
Now my newly-minted conservative mind asks me whether what she did was wrong at all.
If you go the route that he was wrong from the start then rejecting him was OK, as was throwing a mere drink over him to cool him down or express her disgust. He seems to have groped her and even in laddish/ladette England slapping his face would be seen as fine.
But it's not England.
Setting his dick alight might be OK according to local customs, and if deadly or wounding force is OK over there then she was merely resourceful.
Mrs Northwester [no kind of Right-winger at all] points out that under certain conditions loutish behaviour like this: fuelled by alcohol; the licence of being abroad and amongst mere foreigners; and large numbers of equally creepy and drunken men, then rape might very soon enter the minds of the tourist and some of his pals as a logical next step from unpunished groping and self-exposure.
She surely put a stop to that. And served notice [if she remains unpunished or merely rebuked by the courts] that tourist men can't treat local women - and maybe tourist women as well - as potential or actual playthings, obedient to their whims.
Does it serve him right? Yes, I think so, and that was the frisson of schadenfreude that inspired me to post about it. And deserving received punishment - or deserving to have one's aggressive will thwarted - isn't narrow-minded even by itself: it is one definition of justice.

9 August 2009 at 10:25
North Northwester said...

However, ignoring the just deserts type of argument, then on prudential grounds I think that what she did was right.
It’s not just about the fun of seeing the villain hurt. It’s about the future, too.
No rape occurred. She did not shoot him dead which might be held disproportionate. She did not hide from properly constituted authority whose purpose is to prevent harmful disorder, but rather she sought it out.
If you accept the right to self-defence in the absence of an omnipresent and omnipotent police force or informer/webcam network, then pre-emption seems to me to be a sensible aspect of that right. We can argue that she could have left it a bit later before, for example, clouting him [though quite why women should have to use main force which will rarely match that of men rather than technology and wit as here anyway I don’t know], but why should she take the risk that he’d smack her to the ground and do his business anyway? There doesn’t seem to have been anyone else on the scene willing to help her or talk him down. If crowds of armed people went around Crete’s bars as vigilantes threatening force against violent or obscene tourists then it might or might not be an order-endangering thing – that would depend on the circumstances and the spirit and mood in which it was done. A gentle warning is different from a lynch-mob. But I do not assume that social, non-State action is necessarily wrong in such cases.
As to other ways of sorting it out - well, in the long-term there’s taking rowdy Brits’ passports away here in the UK, or the Greek authorities stamping them persona non grata or whatever, or long prison sentences or death for those who do act obscenely or who commit rape, or much increased police or surveillance activity of the tourist areas… None of which strikes me as very attractive. They might be necessary, and I think some of them surely WILL become necessary if this woman is punished harshly and/or the ‘Brit’ is absolved and maybe compensated [as might well happen in Britain]. We’ve seen too many villains’ ‘rights’ upheld and criminals transformed into victims here to doubt that this is a possibility. Why not in Greece?
This is one of those cases when ‘balance’ is as good a political and moral guide as anything more concrete or absolute, such as ‘individual autonomy’ or rigid obedience to the law.
He had no right to do what he did, and he had ignored two non-violent warnings/objections. Other than leaving the bar [and could she? - was she hemmed in by walls of drunken tourists oblivious to her situation? Did he have confederates egging him on?] there was little else that I can see that she could have done, apparently alone and against a person unaware or uncaring of the wrong that he was doing.

9 August 2009 at 10:25
North Northwester said...

James.
Welcome again. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one - ungrateful on a day when I notice your blogger icon adorning my 'Followers' panel,[thanks so much for that] but...
Free speech and so on.

I can't see that he had any right to do what he did at all. He ignored two warnings or two sets of warnings after assaulting her. He would not be right then clouting her as a punishment - because she was innocent of any aggression.
She may have also done humanity the service of preventing the further debasement of the gene pool twice over by the same action...
Bring back the maidenly slap and manly approval of it, say I.

9 August 2009 at 10:40
North Northwester said...

Goodnight Vienna.

Do as much as you wish. I had originally thought of a modest single day as with your Positive News Day, but Julia says she's going to do one artwork a day, and as 'host' I feel obliged to do the same. Also, I'm a boy so there might be that competition thing - as if trying to keep neck and neck with one of the most frequent posters in the UK Dextrosphere looks doomed to fail.

Basically, there are at least 3 works I have more or less ready, so one post a day for me for sure till Thursday - and by then I might have a film and a TV programme to add, too - and maybe something special at the weekend.

I notice that your place is awash with verse and music at the moment, and all I wanted to do was encourage my friends to highlight what we’re for. The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned: this is war, and the culture is both the battleground and the home front for which we fight.

And of course, if you use the tab and send me emails for each post, I can keep the round-up going on a daily basis...

9 August 2009 at 10:56
Goodnight Vienna said...

Thanks for that NNW - I'll probably do just the one post for Monday then. As you say, my blog is pretty much awash with music and poetry - but it always has been - that's been the case from when I started it and in fact my first entry was a poem (Wordsworth iirc).

9 August 2009 at 17:14

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