We are now — in the Me Decade — seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?
The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.
Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.
The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize — but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating! — to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.
Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan — “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” — seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name — they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.
Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, 1976-08-23.
July 29, 2018
QotD: The third Great Awakening
July 19, 2018
Mucking around with Stonehenge
Many people are still under the impression that Stonehenge was built by the Druids (debunked in this video by Siobhan Thompson). At least as many people think that the modern day stone circle is an undisturbed historical relic, and that the stones are standing today as and where they have for thousands of years. All the way back in 2001, Emma Young did a quick debunking of that theory in New Scientist:
An early photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons
Photo from a similar angle in 2008 showing the extent of reconstruction.
Via Wikimedia Commons
Most of the one million visitors who visit Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain every year believe they are looking at untouched 4,000-year-old remains. But virtually every stone was re-erected, straightened or embedded in concrete between 1901 and 1964, says a British doctoral student.
“What we have been looking at is a 20th-century landscape, reminiscent of what Stonehenge might have looked like thousands of years ago,” says Brian Edwards, a student at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
Stonehenge isn’t the only ancient site to have been transformed in recent years, he says. “Even many of the local people in Avebury weren’t aware that a lot of the stones were put up in the 1930s,” he told New Scientist.
[…]
English Heritage says it is now considering covering the Stonehenge alteration programme in detail in the next edition of its official guidebook to the site. A decision not to include the work in official guides was taken in the 1960s, says Dave Batchelor, English Heritage’s senior archaeologist.
The first restoration project took place in 1901. A leaning stone was straightened and set in concrete, to prevent it falling.
More drastic renovations were carried out in the 1920s. Under the direction of Colonel William Hawley, a member of the Stonehenge Society, six stones were moved and re-erected.
Cranes were used to reposition three more stones in 1958. One giant fallen lintel, or cross stone, was replaced. Then in 1964, four stones were repositioned to prevent them falling.
The 1920s ‘restoration’ was the most “vigorous”, says Christopher Chippindale of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “The work in the 1920s under Colonel William Crawley is a sad story,” he says.
As I commented on a post back in 2010:
I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).
Atlas Obscura recently had a set of photos of Stonehenge taken in 1867 likely featuring the family of Colonel Sir Henry James, of the Ordnance Survey. There’s also a watercolour by John Constable from around 1835 showing a very different, more ruin-y monument:
July 18, 2018
An Israeli milestone is reached
Barbara Kay in the National Post:
The announcement was not unexpected.
On the contrary, for those who follow the subject, it was long anticipated. But the words themselves, spoken by Israel’s Immigration Minister, Sofa Landver, still carried emotional force: “Israeli Jews now constitute the largest Jewish community in the world.”
Until now, the U.S., with its many millions of Jews, has been the most Jewish country in the world. For context, in 1948, when Israel achieved official nationhood, only 600,000 of the world’s 11.5 million Jews lived there (5.2 per cent of world Jewry). By 1967, Israel’s Jewish population was 2.4 million (almost 20 per cent), and in 2012, 5.9 million (43 per cent).
The exact numbers are disputed according to methodology and definition of Jewishness. Landver puts the Israeli number at 6.6 million, the U.S. figure at 5.7 million, while Pew has the U.S. number at 7.7 million Jews identifying as Jewish at some level, which includes 2.4 million people with “Jewish background,” but no affiliation or practice.
However one calculates who is or is not Jewish for census purposes, everyone agrees the trend is to a diminishing Jewish presence in America (secularization, intermarriage, low birthrate) and an escalating Jewish presence in Israel. So whether it’s this week or next year, the population dies are cast, and will, according to Hebrew University’s Sergio DellaPergolo, an expert on Jewish demographics, reflect a demographic reality not experienced by the Jewish people since 586 BCE.
In the age-old question: is this good or bad for the Jews?
It’s good in the sense that, since Israel is the Jewish homeland with Jews the only extant indigenous people who consider it sacred space, this is a return to an original norm. Twenty years ago, it was estimated that 98 per cent of Jews no longer reside in the place in which at least one grandparent was born. Perhaps it is a few percentage points fewer today. Still, such numbers speak to a rather lachrymose history of dispersion and insecurity, in which the dream of Zion restored has been both a comfort in adversity and motivation for endurance.
Once the dream came true (at a cost of two-thirds of European Jews’ deaths, numbers still not made up), it makes sense that Jews should gather in the one place where they know they will be unconditionally welcome. A steady stream of European Jews — notably from France, where the state has proved unequal to the task of quelling or reliably containing Muslim anti-Semitism — will continue to swell the ranks of highly cultured and well-educated Jews who can fairly seamlessly and productively integrate into Israeli society.
July 13, 2018
Lee Kuan Yew and the Muslim minority in Singapore
I must admit that I know very little about Singapore’s late long-serving Prime Minister, or that he’d been quite outspoken in his views on Islam and how Muslims must fit in to Singapore’s future (and not the other way around):
Singapore has been in the news for other reasons recently, but its appearance on the world stage, however brief, may provide us with an excuse to consider the views on Islam of the founding father of Singapore, and its longest-serving Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015. Lee Kuan Yew lived in a multicultural city, with a Chinese majority and Indian and Muslim Malay minorities. All his political life, Lee Kuan Yew was aware of the need to keep the Muslim population in check. The laws he had passed, the regulations he enforced, were directed in large part to that end. He knew about Muslim efforts to convert others, and he made sure that any convert had to immediately register with the government, so such efforts could be monitored, and then countered, by the government. A study of all the ways that Lee Kuan Yew dealt with Muslims, and took careful note of, and combated, their natural aggressiveness and political machinations in tiny Singapore, an island of mostly Unbelievers — 3/4 of whom are Chinese — in a Muslim sea, should be instructive for Western leaders, who have the same problem and as yet only timid and confused ideas as to how to solve it.
Wikileaks revealed that Lee Kuan Yew had called Islam “a venomous religion.” He made sure to limit the numbers of Muslims in Singapore’s armed forces, suggesting their religion made them a possible danger to their non-Muslim fellow soldiers. In his “The Malays in Singapore,” he wrote that “if, for instance, you put in a Malay officer who’s very religious and who has family ties in Malaysia in charge of a machine gun unit, that’s a very tricky business.” It was under his leadership that the government instituted a ban on hijabs and other Muslim headscarves in both the police forces and nursing jobs. Lee Kuan Yew also substantially reduced government funding for madrasas, while increasing support for secular education. His government carefully monitored the mosques, both for the content of the imam’s sermons, and for any foreign (especially Saudi) sources of financial support that might lead to a mosque being “radicalized.” Clearly he understood the danger of Islam.
Lee Kuan Yew had, after all, originally declared Singapore’s independence from Malaysia because the Muslim Malays rejected meritocracy, and insisted on giving economic advantage to themselves. All Malays were required to be counted as Muslims (even if some were not), and all Muslims benefited from a disguised jizyah tax on non-Muslims which is called the “Bumiputra.” Although the word means “sons of the soil,” it is not the indigenous Malaysian tribes that benefit from the “Bumiputra” policy, but Malay Muslims alone.
Singapore has been an economic miracle since independence, but it has been ruled with an authoritarian iron hand in many ways.
July 9, 2018
Nominating Amy Barrett “would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae”
I have no idea who President Trump will announce later today as his nominee for the vacancy on the US Supreme Court, but Conrad Black is plumping for one particular candidate:
The desperation of the Democrats to stop the apparently inexorable rise of a president they so completely discounted and despised, and assumed they could remove or emasculate just by turning up the volume and activity of their media organ monkeys, may drive them to accidental suicide over the latest Supreme Court vacancy. I have no standing at all to intuit whom the president may nominate. But if, as I suspect, it is Judge Amy Barrett, it would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Barrett to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on October 31, by a 55-43 vote. Three Democrats voted for her and two did not vote. It would not be easy to justify changing their votes now, as she has served unexceptionably. At her confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee’s aged ranking Democrat, asked Barrett about her religious views, and the nominee responded that no judge should allow personal views, whether based on faith or anything else, to influence the imposition of the law. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern,” Feinstein said infamously. This was an outrageous comment; Feinstein doesn’t know anything about the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has no idea what privately motivates Judge Barrett.
The fury and haste of the Democrats once the starting gun went off with the announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, expressed their blind panic that their entire protracted regime of encroachments and embellishments on the Constitution — buttressing their centralized and authoritarian notion of administrative juridical governance with pretense to defending the rights of women, affirmative action, and the legislative role of the judiciary generally — was now under mortal assault.
[…]
I believe the president will nominate Barrett, that the Democrats will take definitive leave of their depleted senses, apostrophize the judge as a Trojan Horse of female submission, that she will clear her hearings with flying colors while the president’s formidable battery of social media and talk show supporters roast the Democrats for attacking an exemplary female achiever and a fine jurist whose only offense is to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest in the country with more than 70 million adherents. Remember, too, the Supreme Court in the final days of its term ruled that crisis pregnancy centers need not advertise the virtues of abortion with Planned Parenthood, and in 2016 said the Little Sisters of the Poor could not be compelled to pay for birth control and sterilization.
As at Cannae and at Austerlitz, the center of the defending force (Democrats), will crumble and President Trump will sweep the field. The Democratic playbook of endless ear-splitting allegations of serial outrages by the president, will not, finally, bring him down. On this issue, of mobilizing unfounded sexist paranoia against a flawless nominee, thereby insulting tens of millions of American women and U.S. Roman Catholics, before raising the objections of fair-minded non-Catholic men, at least another 20 percent of the population, the Democrats will immolate themselves in an unprecedentedly spectacular launch of their midterm election campaign.
Of course, no matter who is put forward, that person will immediately become the target of a supersized version of the “two-minute hate” that will literally last for months, or until the nominee is driven to decline the nomination, at which point the hate will be directed at the next nominee. Pedantically, however, Black’s use of Cannae and Austerlitz is only metaphorical: at Austerlitz, the allied centre did crumble, but at Cannae, it was the Roman cavalry on the flanks that crumbled, allowing the Carthaginians to envelop the rear of the main Roman army. Two very different battles.
July 2, 2018
The holy book of Marx and the religion of progress
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the religious nature of progressive thought in the western world:
While the left not only filled every nook and cranny of twentieth century “narrative industries” to the point the only way a conservative could work in one of those was under deep, deep cover, the engineers made the internet.
The left didn’t even know it really had any serious opposition left. You can’t blame them too much. Even those of us who were very opposed and very disgusted kept it polite in public and treated them as retarded children who couldn’t take opposition.
Would it have made any difference if we’d talked back, say 30 years ago?
I doubt it.
You see, leftism is as much as anything else a religion. The crazy Marx with his vision of the future created an entire narrative from paradise (pre-capitalism, i.e. it never existed, guys, not even as apes. Apes, as we now know, trade) through fall into capitalism to eventual paradise again, where the New Man (what used to be called the Soviet Man) will be so altruistic and communally oriented that a government isn’t needed. (Like the peace of Islam, there’s only one way to obtain that, and no. Just no. Worldwide species extinction is as fantastical as the idea of that primordial paradise. Humans are humans, and someone will survive. I’m just not interested in letting them send us back ten thousand years.)
You hear it in the talk of the left — particularly the rather intellectually inbred fourth generation, who ate the pap the older people fed them and never had an original thought in their lives — stuff like calling us “reactionaries” (when they’re the ones in power, and have been for a long time, and the ones knee-jerk reacting) and talking about “the future” as belonging utterly to them, and the arrow of history, as though history were the chart in their book, with an arrow beneath.
Their faith doesn’t align particularly well with reality. For instance there’s the whole thing of them talking about us — always — as though we were the ones in power, when they have all the gatekeeping positions and all the contacts.
This dissonance has required them to make up invisible monsters that give us all the power: Patriarchy (a laughable idiocy in America and weak everywhere in the west. While they refuse to see it in the Middle East and Latin America where it actually exists in spades.) Micro aggressions. White privilege (which is so strong that it gives an edge to concentration camp survivors.)
All the while they refuse to admit the real privilege: Leftist privilege. The fastest way to rise in the narrative fields is to be lefter-than-thou. Because they’re in charge and that’s how the system is setup, so they can stay in charge.
Unfortunately this has created their isolation. You see, every song, every movie, ever history book, every fictional book, assures them they’ll win. They know that “the people united shall never be defeated.” They also know that though held back by patriarchy, racism, sexism and all the micro aggressions, the people really are with them. HAVE TO BE, because they’re ideology of the future, and history’s arrow points to their paradise. Every book, movie, etc. says so either subtly or openly. So they KNOW. Everybody knows.
June 27, 2018
Canada’s euphemistically named “High Risk Returnees”
Judith Bergman on the Canadian government’s kid-gloves approach to dealing with Canadian citizens who return to Canada after volunteering to serve with terrorist organizations:
Canadians who go abroad to commit terrorism – predominantly jihadists, in other words – have a “right to return” according to government documents obtained by Global News. They not only have a right of return, but “… even if a Canadian engaged in terrorist activity abroad, the government must facilitate their return to Canada,” as one document says.
According to the government, there are still around 190 Canadian citizens volunteering as terrorists abroad. The majority are in Syria and Iraq, and 60 have returned. Police are reportedly expecting a new influx of returnees over the next couple of months.
The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return. The Canadian government has established a taskforce, the High Risk Returnee Interdepartmental Taskforce, that, according to government documents:
“… allows us to collectively identify what measures can mitigate the threat these individuals may pose during their return to Canada. This could include sending officers overseas to collect evidence before they depart, or their detention by police upon arrival in Canada.”
Undercover officers may also be used “to engage with the HRT [High Risk Traveler] to collect evidence, or monitor them during their flight home.”
In the sanitizing Orwellian newspeak employed by the Canadian government, the terrorists are not jihadis who left Canada to commit the most heinous crimes, such as torture, rape and murder, while fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but “High Risk Travelers” and “High Risk Returnees”.
The government is fully aware of the security risk to which it is subjecting Canadians: According to the documents, “HRRs [High Risk Returnees] can pose a significant threat to the national security of Canada”. This fact raises the question of why the government of Canada is keen to facilitate these people’s “right of return” — when presumably the primary obligation of the government is to safeguard the security of law-abiding Canadian citizens.
June 17, 2018
Blackmailing the Bishop – Blackadder – BBC
BBC Comedy Greats
Published on 11 Jan 2010The baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells comes to collect a debt, but finds himself the victim of a fiendish plot.
June 11, 2018
Feature History – Thirty Years’ War
Feature History
Published on 12 Nov 2016Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring religious conflict, tragic war, and a really nifty collaboration with Jabzy.
3 Minute History – German Peasant’s War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeQVAUmyLksInvolvement Chart
June 9, 2018
QotD: Thomas Jefferson on Epicurus and Plato
As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us… Their great crime [the Stoics] was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Short, 1819-10-31.
June 4, 2018
QotD: Pushing the Confederacy down the memory hole
Lately, I have been mightily irritated by the politically-correct campaign to permanently banish the old Confederate flag, and all music associated with the Southern cause, or any symbol that it once existed, before it was comprehensively defeated a century-and-a-half ago. Memorials of Robert E. Lee are being treated as memorials of Adolf Q. Hitler.
It strikes me that even under the old lamentable cotton-plantation slave system of the South, people mixed and got to smell one another — rich and poor, black and white, genteel and grotesque. That, the most forgotten slogan of the Dixie Land was her war cry: “Down with the Eagle, and up with the Cross!” That, it is the Cross of Saint Andrew astride the old Confederate flag that is most galling to the hyper-secular, liberal mind. That, the greatest triumph of the Union propaganda was to tar all those flag-bearers in the way our contemporary media demean all dissenters from the current party line as “racists,” “sexists,” “phobes,” and nothing more. That, the principal crime of the South was to stand by the wording of the U.S. Constitution, and from the beginning, to get in the way of a grand national scheme for social engineering, which triumphed with Lincoln (though hardly a liberal by the standards of today). That, in the Southern view, the eagle swooped down on them, with claws.
Something similar is now happening in the division of “Red States” and “Blue”: in an America from which the Christian conception of the “common man” is being systematically expunged. All who resist the categories to which they have been assigned are instinctively rebelling; “victim” and “oppressor” alike. This is what “common men” will do, when tarred and pressed, often without fully understanding why they rebel. They remember, however obliquely, whose sons and daughters they are. That, no matter how low in social station, they are Christ’s, and not the segregated chattels of some malicious and incompetent — and intentionally divisive — Washington Nanny.
The recovery of USA, and more largely, the recovery of Christendom, turns on the recovery of this conception of the “common man” — as Man, not as member of a client group. This has nought to do with “equality,” for it is none of a government’s business to help one group get even with another. Rather it is to serve man as man. This is a matter that goes deeper even than slavery, as Saint Paul explained. It is an unarguable, even mystical point. Where that conception survives, of the common in man, Christendom persists, and can potentially flourish.
David Warren, “The common man”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-29.
June 2, 2018
The Robinson Affair (that the British establishment would like to “disappear”)
If you haven’t been paying attention to the British media, you might not have heard about Tommy Robinson and his crusade to expose the “Asian grooming gangs” that have been left almost undisturbed by the British police, prosecutors and (until very recently indeed) the media:
The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.
Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.
But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.
Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.
But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence [PDF], which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.
Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.
From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.
May 29, 2018
The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry – Sacred Geometry – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 26 May 2018Before we get into non-Euclidian geometry, we have to know: what even is geometry? What’s up with the Pythagorean math cult? Who was Euclid, for that matter? And what the heck is the 5th Postulate?
May 28, 2018
Middle East: Palmyra Today – Afterword – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Oct 2015Learn about Odenathus, King of Palmyra: http://bit.ly/1GDsDvz
____________Palmyra is an embodiment of our shared past, but right now it’s under the control of ISIS. They have destroyed the antiquities that remind us of our shared past. We would like to take a moment to honor Dr. Khaled al-Assad, the museum director who gave his life rather than reveal the locations of more Palmyrene relics for ISIS to destroy.
May 27, 2018
Woke-ism, the new religion of progressives
John McWhorter notes the strong parallels between Christianity and woke-ness:
Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.
This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.
I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.
[…]
The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.
What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions — other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.
