Aristocrat

The question is, should we care more for 'our' people than for other people? Why?

I just don't see why you white western men think you are having it so tough. Where's your evidence for that?

The idea these days, is that no group, like you white males, should get special treatment. So violence toward anyone, male or female is supposed to be treated equally. Why should there be special programs for male victims of female violence.

I'm not sure that I'd want Arts graduates helping in any areas where someone with psych degree is needed. Like in the areas of homelessness, suicide and other mental disorders. Why should Arts graduates do that sort of work when they are qualified for something else?

Mollydukes, the general trend in the Arts at the moment is to support women, ethnic minorities, and anything perceived as non-Western. Often this goes under the latest trendy buzzword of "equality." But by your thinking no group should be privileged. This doesn't fit with the current trend in Academia.
The Arts are mostly funded by white, male tax-payers. They then should expect something in return rather than being the butt of polemics.

Aristocrat, I agree it's a strange situation in the Arts and I think I understand why it upsets you. I found the level of scholarship in the Visual Arts faculty where I did part of a degree, to be laughable.

But again I suggest that you put too much emphasis on what those in the Arts do and say. They are entitled to advocate for what they believe is important in society.

I just think that it doesn't matter much what they say or do, it's interesting if you are interested in those sort of ideas but there are a lot more useful, relevant and reliable sources of information and ideas about the world coming from other faculties.

Blistering barnacles! I have often thought that it should be compulsory for every university student to do one or two basic Arts units, precisely so that they don't labour under misconceptions resulting from discursive errors such as for example "The Arts care more for people on the other side of the planet than they do their own people".

Fundamentally, Arts is concerned with analysing the ways that culture, language, society, the physical environment etc shape people's thinking - and with ensuring the people who study it develop the capacity to think critically about the information they come across through their everyday lives, and to recognise the effect of socio-cultural phenomena on their attitides, beliefs, and approaches to work, discovering the meaning of life etc - and ultimately to find more efficient ways of engaging with these effects in everything we do. You'd be surprised for example at how much influence cultural normatives have over the ways that science and maths are conducted, if you looked into it.

[cont]

Just because Arts graduates talk about asylum seekers more than they do "their own people" (a concept which I would argue is another discursive error - people are people no matter where they come from, and I have just as much connection with the person who lives across the street from me whom I've never met, as I do with a South Sudanese person in a refugee camp. And what's more so do you. Further, a street sweeper and a highly educated person indisputably have a wholly equivalent value, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just prejudiced. Hmmm, and why does the word "Rector" always make me think of bottoms??) doesn't mean they (or, "we") are less concerned with local problems. It's just that we see the way the Australian government is treating asylum seekers to be a particularly unnecessary, misguided, deleterious approach that could quite easily be rectified by having a small number of powerful people change their minds about what to do. Our relative silence on homelessness is not a result of lassitude, but because we know through our significant interest in the issue that there is quite a lot of good being done in this area already, but that homelessness doesn't lend itself to improvement just through a few policy tweeks - it's a relatively intractable, multidisciplinary problem - an so agitating about it is not going to make much difference. But if they start locking homeless people in asylums and pauper's workhouses again, then watch out!

There are over 3 billion worthy souls who want to come here. Why do lazy so and so bleeding hearts fall in love with helping the few who pay SMUGGLERS to get on rickety media attracting trojan hrose boats to come here.

If ASIO had any intel at all they would know these boat people are either human rights violaters who have gotten their fare by stepping on others or are in fact covertly sponsored by the very terrorist Governments they are supposed to be fleeing.

The Trojans had the same bleeding hearts within their city walls when the Greeks gifted them with that bloody big horse and their subsequent ANNIHILATION.

I have nothing but CONTEMPT for such lazy & stupid bleeding heart minds who WOULD instantly change camps if said asylum seekers were to live NEXT DOOR to THEM.

First and foremost, Australia has a long history of LOW populations because it is a DESERT. Sustainability and Environmental STEWARDSHIP MUST trump all other considerations.

Proponent of asylum seekers are like the kind man who let the woman ride his back across the deep river. Half way across she began choking and drowning him. When he asked WHY she answered:

"Because I can!"