Art & Culture Archives - Rod Fleming's World

04/05/2021

Parler is back! With new hosting and CEO.

Originally posted 2021-02-16 12:27:10.

Parler, a free speech social medium that had its hosting withdrawn last month, is back. It has new hosting, SkySilk, which is in the USA but is committed to freedom of expression. It said ‘(SkySilk) advocates the right to private judgement and rejects the role of being judge, jury and executioner…(we) will support Parler in their efforts to be a nonpartisan public square. ‘ Anyone familiar with the way Twitter in particular censors all comment except the extreme Left’s will surely applaud this.

The company has a new CEO, whose appointment is expected to be temporary. The ousting of founder John Matze appears to have come because of a fall-out with the site’s major host and shareholder, Rebekah Mercer.

Mark Meckler, one-time co-founder of the Tea-Party Patriots, has been appointed as interim CEO. He said ‘We are committed to…our role as the premier platform for free speech, data sovereignty and civil discourse.’

Parler can be accessed online at https://parler.com/ However, at time of writing, this site was not working properly, at least from my location.

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03/05/2021

Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar

Originally posted 2017-01-15 06:00:48.

Last week I visited Bataan, here in the Philippines, for the first time. I was amazed by the scenery, which is remarkable; beautiful mountains, beaches and sea views, amongst everything else. What a richness this country has! Anyway, the highlight of the tour was when an old friend suggested going to Las Casas de Acuzar at Bagac.

Bagac is south of Olongapo on Subic Bay and is accessible by bus. Once again, the scenery en route is spectacular.

I was expecting a beach and maybe a nice old village — my friend and guide, Belgie, said ‘There are old houses’. I wasn’t even slightly prepared for what I saw.

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18/04/2021

Drinking rum with Bowie’s ghost

Originally posted 2016-01-12 17:34:20.

I am drinking rum with a ghost. He’s sitting over there with all my memories beside him. He wrote the soundtrack to my life and now he’s gone. Now he’s just a ghost, a phantom. A collection of sounds and images, words and memories. But the real artist that he was has gone.

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09/04/2021

The Storytelling Ape

Originally posted 2013-12-05 13:50:53.

It’s a striking thought that civilisation evolved here on Earth only 7,000 years ago. Since then, humans have achieved many really incredible things. But even in terms of our own—mostly unwritten—history, 7,000 years is almost insignificant; it’s less than 4 % of the time Homo sapiens, the storytelling ape, has existed.

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07/04/2021

Peggy Reeves Sanday: life in a Modern Matriarchy

Originally posted 2020-10-05 15:00:16.

Dr Peggy Reeves Sanday is best known for her work amongst a tribal people called the Minangkabau who live in Indonesia. They are also called the Urang Padang and are the largest ethnic group on the island of Sumatra, whose traditional homeland is the west-central highlands. While these are notionally Muslim, they actually follow what is locally called an ‘adat’ which is a tribal set of beliefs, permitted under the local form of Islam. There are many of these.

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01/04/2021

How Contemporary Gallery Art became a disaster

Originally posted 2017-07-31 23:25:11.

Contemporary gallery art is a very expensive, publicly-funded white elephant, a crutch of the elite. To call today’s art education, which feeds the galleries with an unending supply of this visual tripe, a catastrophic disaster, would be an understatement. It’s time we stopped pandering to its promoters.

Today we live in a West where multiculturalism has all but made us forget that Post-Renaissance European culture is what shaped the world. Everywhere, people learn English. In India, Urdu is dying because students are taught in English.

Yet language is not alone amongst our triumphs. Alongside our technological and scientific prowess there is another pillar of our culture: our art.

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21/03/2021

Feminism promotes male transgenderism 1

Originally posted 2019-05-14 08:03:32.

Male non-homosexual gender dysphoria is being provoked by deliberate cultural stimuli that denigrate men and masculinity and promote women and femininity. Something is causing an uptick in it; while non-homosexual GD in women is actually increasing faster and in many ways is more worrying, there is still an unprecedented increase in the male form, AGP. This is the result of fifty years of feminism.

Some researchers have suggested that there might be an innate cause for AGP, but the characteristics of the condition do not support this. Non-homosexual Gender Dysphoria (GD) in males, otherwise known as autogynephilia or AGP, shows absolutely no consistency, especially in the modern context, where we see it as much broader than the original ‘fetishist masturbation as a woman’ model envisioned by Blanchard.

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