seangabb
Published 11 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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May 10, 2022
The Crusades: Part 4 — Life in Outremer
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November 13, 2021
Creation of Israel
The Cold War
Published 1 Jun 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on the creation of Israel, Zionist movement, reactions and diplomatic maneuvers of other states and the build-up to first Arab-Israeli war
Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar
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September 20, 2021
History-Makers: Maimonides
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Sep 2021“From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.” Jump into 1100s Cordoba & Cairo as we take a look at the life of one of the Medieval world’s most boundary-breaking History-Makers: Moses Maimonides!
SOURCES & Further Reading: Great Courses lectures “Jewish Scholar in Cairo: Moses Maimonides” from The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age by Eamonn Gearon and “Maimonides and Jewish Law” from Great Minds of the Medieval World by Dorsey Armstrong. Britannica “Maimonides” https://www.britannica.com/biography/…, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Maimonides” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ma…, The Guide For The Perplexed, Mishne Torah and Commentary on the Mishnah by Maimonides
Special thanks to Yellow/LudoHistory for his assistance in checking over my script. You can check out his livestreams playing historically-inspired videogames over at https://www.twitch.tv/ludohistory
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
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August 3, 2021
History Summarized: Abrahamic Religious Philosophy
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 Jun 2017Alrighty, here goes nothing. With three religions’ individual histories in the bag, and one campaign each by the Muslims and Christians covered on this channel, let’s see if we can find a way to all get along.
RELEVANT LINKS:
History Summarized: Islam: https://youtu.be/Uvq59FPgx88?
History Summarized: Christianity: https://youtu.be/A86fIELxFds?
History Summarized: Judaism: https://youtu.be/aKB6WduDwNE?
History Summarized: Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim Conquest https://wp.me/p2hpV6-gQv
History Summarized: The Crusades: https://youtu.be/wZhyDIIkeLoPATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…?
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…?Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
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July 20, 2021
History Summarized: Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim Conquest
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 10 Jun 2017It’s all coming together now. With the individual histories of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism covered, Blue puts it together to summarize how the three interacted in the centuries leading up to the Crusades. The next video will cover the Crusades. Hype.
RELEVANT LINKS:
History Summarized: Islam: https://youtu.be/Uvq59FPgx88
History Summarized: Christianity: https://youtu.be/A86fIELxFds
History Summarized: Judaism: https://youtu.be/aKB6WduDwNEHistory Summarized: The Crusades: https://youtu.be/wZhyDIIkeLo
History Summarized: Abrahamic Religious Philosophy: https://youtu.be/B7myRRt0Mn8PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…
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July 14, 2021
Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2021How did Germans with Jewish heritage still serve in the Luftwaffe? And what happened to the Allied POW’s from the German invasions of France and Belgium? And what the hell happened with those tiny Vichy islands near Canada? We answer all of this in today’s Out of the Foxholes.
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June 24, 2021
First Arab-Israeli War 1948 – Political Background – COLD WAR
The Cold War
Published 31 Aug 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary explaining the political background of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
To learn about the military events of this conflict, go to the Kings and Generals channel
Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar
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June 15, 2021
History Summarized: Persistence of Judaism
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Apr 2017Gooooood morning everybody! Today, Blue finishes the trilogy of Abrahamic religions with a video summarizing the history of the Hebrew people and the Jewish faith. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so fasten your seatbelts for a twenty-minute rundown of the facts, the theories, and the ever-so-popular misconceptions!
Look forward to next time, when Blue brings it all together to talk about Religious Wars and Religious Philosophy!
PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
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May 1, 2021
Rulers Who Were Actually Good — History Hijinks
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Apr 2021History is full of Rulers, but most of them (especially some famous ones) can be Kind Of Terrible upon closer inspection. So let’s take a look at two kings we can actually consider to be Good — not perfect, not blameless, but a heck of a lot more virtuous than the average ruler, that’s for sure.
This topic was requested by our patron Duncan! Thank you for your patronage, and for the topic suggestion.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Great Courses Plus lectures “Being Persian” by Robert Garland, “The Persian Era” by Jean-Pierre Isbouts, “Saladin: Chivalry and Conquest – 1187” by Eamonn Gearon, and “Saladin and the Defeat of the Crusaders” by Dorsey Armstrong.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
TRACKLIST: “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” “Pippin the Hunchback” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/ospOUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
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March 18, 2021
QotD: Leftists are generally rebelling against the man … even when they’re in charge
Leftism is, and always has been, an oppositional identity. “Rebelling” against “the Man” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and despite a half-century of practice, Liberals haven’t figured out how to handle the situation when they, themselves, are The Man. It doesn’t compute. Hence the strange spectacle of modern life, where Lefty controls everything but carries on like he’s a tiny, persecuted minority …
That’s where religion really comes in handy, and it’s no surprise that Leftism has so rapidly curdled into a chiliastic suicide cult. Not to tell guys like Max Müller their jobs, but it’s wrong to call Christianity an “Abrahamic” faith. Yes, it sprang from Judaism in its externals, but its orientation is totally inward. Judiasm, and Islam (which IS an “Abrahamic” faith) are outwardly oriented, communitarian. They’re ideally suited for small, tight-knit communities. So are Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, and so forth. All of these are best described as ethnic religions — one doesn’t convert to Judaism or Hinduism; one must be adopted into the group.
Christianity and Buddhism, by contrast, are renunciant religions. From the very beginning they were urban faiths. Their ideal figure is the hermit or stylite, but in practice these men are supported by a small, tight-knit community … as opposed, as ostentatiously as possible, to the hustle and bustle of the big city. (That Europe in the “Christian centuries” was overwhelmingly rural is incidental. Christianity took root in the only place it could — the teeming metropolises of the Roman Empire. It spread out from its urban core, such that it was well established in the hinterland by the time the Empire fell). Christians are specifically commanded to be IN the world, but not OF the world, while the whole point of Buddhism is to escape the world while still somehow being physically in it.
It should come as no surprise, then, that what I call Lifestyle Leftists — those groovy folks who aren’t really political, who only mouth the slogans because they’re still trying to live like college kids well into middle age — all adopted some vague Buddhist-flavored “spirituality” back when. They want to make a big show of being against the dominant culture, but they lack the discipline for any real religious commitment, so they, you know, meditate on their, like, auras, man. Lots of nominally Christian denominations got in on the act, too, and hey, look at that
Despite the professional musicians and the light shows, people couldn’t be arsed to go to church, because why would they? Better to, you know, just kinda, like, do your own thing, man, I’m spiritual but not religious.
Alas for them, they forgot the basic thing we noted, above — renunciant doesn’t mean “doing your own individual thing;” it means “retreating into a monastic community.” The sangha is one of the pillars of Buddhism, and the only reason anyone has heard of the Desert Fathers is because those supposed hermits had large communities built up around them. You simply can’t be a solitary Christian or Buddhist, pursuing your own individual enlightenment without reference to the wider world. It doesn’t work like that.
Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.
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March 1, 2021
QotD: Anti-semitism in Harold Lamb’s novels
Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that [Edgar Rice] Burroughs [Wikipedia] was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!
Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.
Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?
Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.
Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable. As long as you hold them, you can’t notice what “whiteness” in Burroughs really means, or account for the genuine multiculturalism of Lamb’s books.
Eric S. Raymond, “Reading racism into pulp fiction”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-18.
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February 11, 2021
The Zionism of Albert Einstein | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! I E.11 – Spring 1921
TimeGhost History
Published 10 Feb 2021Albert Einstein may be renowned for his work in the field of science, but this season he is fundraising for a new Jewish university. Charity isn’t the only activity on the cards in the United States this season however, much more tragic events are also afoot …
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
– Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
– Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
– Daniel HassSources:
Some images from the Library of CongressFrom the Noun Project:
– Death by Adrien Coquet
– Ukraine by Lluisa Iborra, ES
– Immigrants by Luis Prado
– sun by MRFA
– Wine by Made
– orange By lieuchien, SG
– Champagne By Pete BakerSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Ominous” – Philip Ayers
– “Prescient” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Document This 1” – Peter Sandberg
– “Growing Doubt” – Wendel Scherer
– “Tiger Rag” – ODJB
– “It’s Not a Game” – Philip AyersArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago
In the year that Buck’s Fizz is born, the USA promises to be a hotbed of funding for Albert Einstein. But for the nation’s black population, this season will brutally prove that the USA is still lightyears from any semblance of racial equality. Further highlighting this racial inwardness will be legislation to curb immigration. Clearly, America is still a long way from being the Land of the Free.Raunchy literature, Broadway and Buck’s Fizz will also make an appearance this season, tune in to find out how!
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December 23, 2020
QotD: Christmas songs
On balance, I prefer the approach of the London Borough of Brent, one of Britain’s sternest loony-left councils but far more sporting than the Scrooge-packed school boards across the Atlantic. Back in the Eighties, Brent decreed that it would permit municipal performances of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” as long as they were accompanied by a couple of non-heterosexist choruses of “I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus”. That’s a lot less vicious than replacing the entire seasonal repertoire with obscurantist dirges for solstice-worshippers. Anyone can St-Nix “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, the hard part is finding something to put in its place.
There are very few good Hannukah songs, never mind Kwanza or the Islamic festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The reason for the dearth of Hanukkah songs is that for most of the last century the Jews were too busy cranking out Christmas songs — Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas”, Mel Torme wrote “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire)”, Jerry Herman “We Need A Little Christmas”, Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “The Christmas Waltz”, Johnny Marks “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas”, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and a zillion others. As far as I know, the only Christian to offer to return the compliment was stiff-necked Mormon Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (whose “Come To The Manger” has been recorded by Donny Osmond). Senator Hatch confirmed to me during his short-lived presidential campaign in 1999 that he was working on a Hanukkah song. I don’t know whether he’s finished it, but I would have to say on balance that, musically speaking, the Christians got the better end of this deal.
Mark Steyn, “Imagine Christmas”, Steyn Online, 2019-12-23 (originally published in The Spectator, 2004).
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December 22, 2020
QotD: The foundational weirdness of Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions
The shortest summary is “No!” The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.
I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.
Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!
Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.
Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.
Eric S. Raymond, “If God is dead, is anything permissible?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-02-10.
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April 30, 2020
QotD: Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity (and Judaism)
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
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