During the depression, Bruce’s parents donated a public transport system to help lift the city back up. So you can’t call them heartless bourgeoisies. You can accuse them of being rich, but that’s another matter. If that’s your thinking, why criticise fictional characters when you can criticise real people? Like Bill Gates, a rich guy who gives huge amounts to charity.

Secondly, it was the blue flower guys who wanted to destroy the city in order to “begin afresh”. To me they sound a lot closer to the mad-rightwing ideology of “kill them all and let God sort them out” than Batman does.

But seriously, can’t people just enjoy a good story every now and again? What next, 1984 was an evil bourgeois campaign against communism?

And Mazumdar’s complete inability to do bhangra with any trace of authenticity, rhythm or grace naturally contributes to his animosity towards Jagdeep.

That’s right folks, I can fabricate the mother of all strawman arguments too.

On a far more serious note, I think that Lex Luthor in “Smallville” is a lot like Bruce Wayne would be if Brucie really did step over to the dark side that he flirts so tantalisingly close to.

After being utterly routed and completely annihilated on several threads, Jagdeep should step back and ask himself why he is so blind.

Which threads were they Mazumdar? Seriously, you must be hallucinating or something.

(Naipual )he broods, stares, growls,

most hilarious line I’ve read yet.

Satan..he broods, stares, growls
lol

Thank you Ramiie and Muzumdar for expanding my knowledge of this issue.

Oh look, Kulvinder is Jagdeep’s greatest fan. Who would have guessed?

Hes putting across an argument rather than resorting to derogatory name calling. But yeah im his biggest fan, in the whole world. EVER. OH NOES!

It is no surprise that Jagdeep idolises a man like Naipaul.

Pandering to the wit of one’s colonial master is something that that comes naturally to Jagdeep.

After being utterly routed and completely annihilated on several threads, Jagdeep should step back and ask himself why he is so blind.

what?

Hhmm, I wonder what’s implied here? Considering that this is how I’ve heard the advocates of Hindutva speak.

Pandering to the wit of one’s colonial master is something that that comes naturally to Jagdeep.

After being utterly routed and completely annihilated on several threads, Jagdeep should step back and ask himself why he is so blind.

What.s also interesting is the way Naipaul colludes with this osbcene presentation of slavery..he decides to call the slaves “Black men” (If he really wanted to point out the absurdity of the painting, he could have simply substitute “slaves” for “Black men”..and the shock, the effect would have been quite something. And dont tell me a writer with gifts such as Naipaul couldn’t make that leap of the imagination!My six year old could have pointed that out.) But instead we have “Black men” twice, in a repeatedly dignified tone, not even a shred of irony.

Naipual’s observation is no exposure of moral blindness, it simply exposes his diseased perception and the rotten heart of Naipaul revisionists, like you Jagdeep. Take a bow.

The Batman of the 1970s was much more socially aware, and in the 1980s he even picked a Robin because he wanted to save a street-kid he found stealing his tyres. What other comic book character ever campaigned against landmines?

The Batman of the 1950s is very different to that of the 1970s who is very different to the one we have now. As DC found that Batman sold more comics the ‘darker’ he became the less interested the stories were in the reasons for crime, and the social setting of the stories.

You also appear to be ill-informed about the Joker, whose origins are explored in-depth in The Killing Joke, and numerous other stories (including a related tale in Tim Burton’s first Batman film).

Unfortunately, you make no well-researched or interesting points, or any that would not occur to someone during an inchoate moment of drunken showing-off.

Well done on taking on a fictional character, however. They’re the ones that really need taking down a peg or two…

There are a number of things in this world where we have to be careful to get it right whether someone is doing it or pointing to it.

Naipaul is describing a piece of art that is painted in a ‘romantic’ style that glosses over the horrors of plantation life.

The whole point he is making is that this is how white people literally ‘white washed’ the oppression of black people in the South, and reduced it to pastoral imagery of gleeful and content black people happily subservient to their oppressors. It is a comment on the romanticisation of slavery by white artists.

It is an observation of their moral blindness and how black suffering was filtered through white people’s moral squalor. They romanticised their relationship with the black people they oppressed — the obscenity was hidden behind art like this.

Ramiie, you really are incoherent, your understanding of Dabydeen is laughable, and the violence and threats underlying your posts to me (“You and him are lucky that we blacks are powerless…we own no powerful media or armies to pursue settle the score”) would be sinister if they were not so clueless and deranged.

“…And something as simple and heartfelt as that was at the back of a beautiful, celebratory book “A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties”..the fifties of the title was the 1850s, before the Civil War..the water colours, of plantation scenes were romantic: sometimes dealing with plantation work, black men in a work gang mending a broken embankment, women loading rice onto a flat plantation barge; sometimes atmospheric studies of water and forest…the planter and his wife (life father and mother in an illustration in a children’s book) moving white and gracious among the smiling blacks, with-in another picture- a little blonde girl receiving a bouquet from a black child.”

No irony. This is, of course the work of your “great great writer.” You and him are lucky that we blacks are powerless…we own no powerful media or armies to pursue settle the score.

(By lectured obviously i mean he simply told the Ugandans a lot of things and by ‘telling’ them was putting them in their place and hence he is a racist)

why would you think that Theroux is not a racist, that he is a friend of the African

Well working for the peacecorp aside he taught in Malawi for 3 years. If you want to take that as the actions of a negrophobe go ahead, but in exchange ill just say thats anti-intellectualism.

Talking about nazis..I could never understand why an apolitical aesthete like Leni Riefenstahl could be destroyed by simply taking the money- like all artists do- and a proper sheepcoat racist like Naipual would make a career demonising blacks yet he is held up by some like a greet seer.