Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2020

A Tale of Two Swords

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 19 Jun 2020

Myles Standish and Benjamin Church were military commanders in 17th century colonial Massachusetts who lived a generation apart. Standish came over on the Mayflower, and commanded the militia of the Plymouth Pilgrims in the 1620s; Church lived his whole life in the New World, and led the crack troops that tracked down Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanoket Wampanoag, during King Philip’s War in the 1670s. Standish carried an elegant German rapier, while Church used a simple naval cutlass. What changed? And what story can these two swords tell about the men who wielded them?

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~REFERENCES~

[1] Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs: “Myles Standish, Born Where? (2010).” Sail 1620 https://web.archive.org/web/201011301…

[2] Nathaniel Philbrick: Mayflower (2006). Penguin Books, Page 59-60

[3] “Short Men ‘Not More Aggressive'” (2007). BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/65…

[4] Charles Francis Adams: The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton (1883). The Prince Society, Page 284 https://archive.org/details/newenglis…

[5] Philbrick, Page 164

[6] Philbrick, Page 151-152

[7] Benjamin Church: Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip’s War, Tercentenary Edition (1975). Pequot Press, Page 67-73

[8] Church, Page 75

[9] Church, Page 105-106

[10] Church, Page 108

[11] Church, Page 140

[12] Lisa Brooks: Our Beloved Kin (2018). Yale University Press, Page 322

[13] Church, Page 142

[14] Douglas Edward Leach: Flintlock and Tomahawk (1958). Parnassus Imprints, Page 231

[15] Philbrick, Page 338

[16] Church, Page 170

[17] Leach, Page 237

[18] Brooks, Page 337

June 17, 2020

Alcibiades, the first recorded iconoclast, but far from the last

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

James Heartfield on the modern day resurgence of iconoclasm:

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

… far more often, the attacks on public symbols are indicative of a breakdown in social solidarity — often with alarming consequences. For activists seeking to win popular support, knocking down statues is a high-risk strategy that can provoke the opposite sentiments to those hoped for. The futurist Marinetti’s proposal to fill in the canals of Venice with concrete to make modern roads is a witty way to make a point, but not a sound policy.

Alcibiades was perhaps the first recorded statue vandal. One night in 415 BC he knocked all the stone cocks off the statues of Hermes in Athens. In 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola launched a Bonfire of the Vanities in which artworks, books and statues were destroyed out of a fear they would tempt people away from God. As any lover of old English churches knows, the furies of the Puritan revolution led to the destruction and defacing of Catholic saints’ statues and paintings.

In the modern era, the temptation to destroy monuments has been strong. In the First World War, Britain’s local authorities changed German-sounding names of streets like Bismarck Road — now Waterlow Road — while bully boys attacked German-owned shops. In 1933, Nazi students in Germany organised bonfires of subversive books, while the Reich organised an exhibition of “degenerate” modernist art. The burning of books only served as a trial run for the extermination of people, as the symbolic slaughter failed to yield the results of a “cleansed” Germany.

People often make the point that there are no statues of Hitler in Germany — though those were not taken down by Germans, but by the Allied occupiers. You can still see Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld and grandstand in Nuremberg, where many of Hitler’s rallies took place, though not much else of his Nazi architecture survives. Mussolini’s architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Marcello Piacentini, did better — much of their absurdly grandiose work survives. The model of an Allied-led “denazification” was in the minds of the US-led forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The destruction of his statue in Baghdad was largely staged by the allies.

Under the Maoist regimes in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, some of the worst atrocities after the Nazis were carried out. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” against the “four olds” led to the destruction of books and artworks. Later, there were showtrials and the politically incorrect were battered by the mob. In the wreckage of Cambodia, Pol Pot led a terrifying war on alleged capitalist-roaders and even intellectuals — who could be handily identified by the fact they wore glasses — that led to millions being killed. Pol Pot declared a “year zero” — that all civilisation before the Khmer Rouge took power would be cancelled. Tragically, the wholesale wiping out of Cambodian culture was only a prelude to the extermination of much of its population. The sentiment of wiping out the wrong history was repeated in the war that al-Qaeda-inspired regimes in Afghanistan and Mali conducted against books and statues that did not match their own Islamist views.

In Soviet Russia, when the communist-allied artists of the Proletkult organisation argued that all Tsarist culture should be expunged, the Bolshevik leader Lenin took them to task for “rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch”. Instead, he said, they should assimilate and re-work “everything of value in the more than 2,000 years of the development of human thought and culture”. Sadly, Lenin’s wise advice was lost on the Stalinist regimes that followed, during which the policy oscillated between futurist iconoclasm and maudlin Russian sentimentality. History got its revenge in eastern Europe when most of the ubiquitous Lenin and Marx statues came down in the 1990s.

June 16, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on Puritanism in the Current Year

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan wonders if there’s any room for debate any more:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

It’s about the dilemma of living in a world where adherence to a particular ideology becomes mandatory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, this orthodoxy, with its tired slogans, and abuse of language, had to be enforced brutally by the state, its spies, and its informers. In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible. But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” (Wesley Lowery objected to this characterization of his beliefs — read his Twitter thread about it here.)

This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.

It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

June 11, 2020

Current year Iconoclasm

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In an Areo article from last year, Alexander Adams discusses the phenomenon of iconoclasm:

The 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Behind any campaign is the campaigner: the activist convinced of his own righteousness.

The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations. The activist often knows almost nothing about the object of his hatred — merely a garbled caricature of a person caught up in the conditions of her age — but the activist acts as if he were not also caught up in the conditions of his own age.

Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act — illegally and unethically — to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society. It sets a challenge that will elicit a strong reaction. Iconoclasm is a warning that the protection of law and social conventions no longer applies and that the cause will be promoted through physical force if necessary.

The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today — even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation. The left-wing activist wants to celebrate current-day multiculturalism, but mostly he wants to erase evidence of the historic monoculturalism that preceded it.

Our willingness to live with historical relics we feel ambivalence towards is a demonstration of our toleration of dissent. Likewise, an openness to imagining ourselves in past times — constrained by the conventions and laws of a different era — forces us to question common assumptions about the completeness of our knowledge and our moral certainty. If we can make this leap of empathy, we can free ourselves of ideological possession. We have the ability to empathize with both slave and slave owner. Empathy makes it harder to justify destruction of the cultural relics of an older age or silence the voices of individuals, who might share insights into life.

The toleration we extend towards symbols of former regimes and proponents of ideas with which we disagree shows our willingness to be honest about our nations’ pasts. To accept our flaws as a necessary part of our development is to display the maturity, restraint and empathy that define the confident yet self-critical nation. For if we cannot stand the sight of a dead political opponent carved in stone, how can we restrain ourselves in the face of a living political opponent who speaks against us?

May 27, 2020

QotD: “Hate speech” is the new secular heresy

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The cynical category of “hate speech” is openly used to police the parameters of acceptable thought and to punish those who are considered to hold heretical views that the guardians of moral correctness oppose. So not only are critics of Islam denounced as “hate speakers” — so are feminists who question the cult of transgenderism, Christians who disapprove of same-sex marriage, right-wing people who want stricter immigration controls, etc. These are all entirely legitimate political or moral opinions. The branding of them as “hate speech” — and therefore undeserving of the protections of freedom of speech — is really a way of calling these views heresy. And of course heretics must be cast out. Feminists, Catholics, critics of Islam — hound them off campus, get them off the airwaves, report them to the police for their crimes of hatred. This is an intolerant assault on heresy of the kind that has appeared many times throughout history. Those who say “It isn’t censorship” protest far too much. Deep down they know it is. Deep down they know they are to the 2020s what Joe McCarthy was to the 1950s.

Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.

February 27, 2020

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU)

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why Toby Young’s FSU is so important right now:

The beautiful thing about the mad reaction to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is that it proves why the union is so necessary. No sooner had Young unveiled his censorship-busting union than the illiberal liberals were out in force to mock it and ridicule it and to insist that, actually, there is no free-speech crisis in the UK. It’s a right-wing myth, they claim. There is no widespread censorship. People aren’t being shipped off to gulags for expressing an opinion. Apparently, the free-speech “grift” – God, I hate the word “grift” – is just a bunch of pale, male and stale blokes pissed off that they can no longer say the N-word or talk openly about women’s boobs. Freedom of speech is not under threat, the Young-bashers claim, and anyone who says it is is probably just an Islamophobe, transphobe or some other breed of phobe itching to spout bile with “no consequences”.

This rank denialism, this blinkered insistence that free speech is not in danger in 21st-century Britain, is exactly why we need the FSU and as broad a discussion as possible about the importance of the liberty to express oneself. Because the fact that so many inhabitants of the chattering-class bubble can’t even see that free speech is dying right now confirms how naturalised and uncontroversial the new censorship has become. They don’t even see it as censorship. They see it as perfectly normal, and good, in fact, that certain views cannot be expressed in public life or on social media. That’s how cavalier the new war on heretical opinion has become. At least in the past, from Torquemada to the McCarthyites, authoritarians were honest about being censors. Today’s self-elected moral guardians of correct opinion are so hubristic, so taken with their own mortal rectitude, that they don’t even see themselves as enemies of freedom, but rather as decent, unimpeachable maintainers of a natural intellectual order.

Things have come to such a pass that these people will literally seek to censor you in one breath and then express alarm at being called censors in the next breath. Hence the Guardian could publish a piece last week claiming that the idea that there is a culture of censorship in British universities is a “right-wing myth” while simultaneously defending censorship on campus. In an act of extraordinary moral contortionism, Evan Smith mocked the “idea that there is a free-speech crisis at British universities” and then, without missing a beat, he defended the policy of No Platform and the creation of safe spaces because “the university cannot be a place where racism and fascism – as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia – are allowed to be expressed”. The Orwellianism is staggering. “There is no censorship on campus. Except the censorship I approve of. Which is not really censorship.” That is what is being said here. The intellectual dishonesty is almost impressive.

This Orwellian denialism of the existence of censorship by people who actually support and enact censorship cuts to the heart of the free-speech crisis in the UK. The reason the illiberal liberals and woke McCarthyites and Twittermobs don’t consider themselves to be censors – even as they gleefully agitate for the censorship of feminists, secularists worried about Islamist extremism, and right-wing people opposed to mass immigration – is because they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

December 24, 2019

Holiday Tales: Christmas

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Dec 2017

Merry Christmas, all! In honor of this complex and multifaceted holiday, today let’s talk about some of the many and varied influences and major historical turning points that sculpted this holiday into what we know and love (or lose our minds at Starbucks over.)

Nobody tell Blue that this video is mostly historical.

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!

December 11, 2019

QotD: Charles I and the Civil War

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive).

Charles I was a Cavalier King and therefore had a small pointed beard, long flowing curls, a large, flat, flowing hat, and gay attire. The Roundheads, on the other hand, were clean-shaven and wore tall, conical hats, white ties, and sombre garments. Under these circumstances a Civil War was inevitable.

The Roundheads, of course, were so called because Cromwell had all their heads made perfectly round, in order that they should present a uniform appearance when drawn up in line.

Besides this, if any man lost his head in action, it could be used as a cannon-ball by the artillery (which was done at the Siege of Worcester).

For a long time before the Civil War, however, Charles had been quarrelling with the Roundheads about what was right. Charles explained that there was a doctrine called the Divine Right of Kings, which said that:

    (a) He was King, and that was right.

    (b) Kings were divine, and that was right.

    (c) Kings were right, and that was right.

    (d) Everything was all right.

But so determined were the Roundheads that all this was all wrong that they drew up a Petition called the Petition of Right to show in more detail which things were wrong. This Petition said:

    (a) That it was wrong for anyone to be put to death more than once for the same offence.

    (b) Habeas Corpus, which meant that it was wrong if people were put in prison except for some reason, and that people who had been mutilated by the King, such as Prynne, who had often had his ears cut off, should always be allowed to keep their bodies.

    (c) That Charles’s memorable methods of getting money, such as Rummage and Scroungeage, were wrong. But the most important cause of the Civil War was Ship Money

Charles I said that any money which was Ship Money belonged to him; but while the Roundheads declared that Ship Money could be found only in the Cinq Ports, Charles maintained that no one but the King could guess right which was Ship Money and which wasn’t. This was, of course, part of his Divine Right. The climax came when a villager called Hampden (memorable for his dauntless breast) advised the King to divine again. This so upset Charles that he went back to Westminster, and after cinquing several ports burst into the House of Commons and asked in a very royal way for some birds which he said were in there. The Parliament, who were mostly Puritans, were so shocked that they began making solemn Leagues and Countenances. Charles therefore became very angry and complaining that the birds had flown raised his standard at Nottingham and declared war against Hampden and the Roundheads.

The War

At first the King was successful owing to Prince Rupert of Hentzau, his famous cavalry leader, who was very dashing in all directions. After this, many indecisive battles were fought at such places as Newbury, Edgehill, Newbury, Chalgrove Field, Newbury, etc., in all of which the Cavaliers were rather victorious.

The Roundheads therefore made a new plan in order to win the war after all. This was called the SelfDenying Ordnance and said that everyone had to deny everything he had done up to that date, and that nobody was allowed to admit who he was: thus the war could be started again from the beginning. When the Roundheads had done this they were called the New Moral Army and were dressed up as Ironclads and put under the command of Oliver Cromwell, whose Christian name was Oliver and who was therefore affectionately known as `Old Nick’. Cromwell was not only moral and completely round in the head but had a large (round) wart on the nose. He was consequently victorious in all the remaining battles such as Newbury, Marston Moor, Edgehill (change for Chalgrove), Naseby, Newbury, etc.

Blood and Ironclads

When Charles I had been defeated he was brought to trial by the Rump Parliament so-called because it had been sitting for such a long time and was found guilty of being defeated in a war against himself, which was, of course, a form of High Treason. He was therefore ordered by Cromwell to go and have his head cut off (it was, the Roundheads pointed out, the wrong shape, anyway). So romantic was Charles, however, that this made little difference to him and it is very memorable that he walked and talked Half an hour after his Head was cut off.

On seeing this, Cromwell was so angry that he picked up the mace (the new and terrible Instrument of Government which he had invented) and, pointing it at the Head, shouted: “Take away that Marble,” and announced that his policy in future would be just Blood and Ironclads.

W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.

December 5, 2019

QotD: [Literal] Health Nazis

Filed under: Germany, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[T]he Nazis’ focus on the threats that risky habits pose to “public health” makes perfect sense in light of their collectivist ideology. “Brother national socialist,” said one bit of Nazi propaganda, “do you know that your Führer is against smoking and thinks that every German is responsible to the whole people for all his deeds and missions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”

Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”

The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.

Jacob Sullum, “So What If Hitler Was an Anti-Smoker?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2004-12-17.

November 26, 2019

Communal farming nearly killed off the Plymouth Colony

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

What saved them was abandoning the “common property” communalism and adopting private ownership of the farms:

The Plymouth Colony 1620-1691.
Map by Hoodinski via Wikimedia Commons.

The first few years of the settlement were fraught with hardship and hunger. Four centuries later, they also provide us with one of history’s most decisive verdicts on the critical importance of private property. We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.

In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?

Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”

The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.

Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit — earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement — saved the people.

Over the centuries, socialism has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count — no matter what shade of it you pick: central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production. Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress. I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true — that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None.

A few of the many examples that echo the Pilgrims’ experience include Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent decades, and even Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

November 21, 2019

QotD: Honour

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about honor. Maybe because I spent the last couple of months mulling over the musketeers. Maybe because I’ve gone back to a regency-reading jag as I work on things as far from regency as possible.

Honor has got a bad rep lately. It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled. Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.

It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings. I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways. I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.) Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters. But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy. And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house? What will people think? You have shamed us all.” I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical. And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.

But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do. Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention. (He didn’t fondle her. He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.) If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue. (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)

Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know. You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind. You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever. (Well, at least in regency romances. I believe true society had more leniency. I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)

Sarah Hoyt, “An Affair of Honor a blast from the past from April 24 2012”, According to Hoyt, 2017-10-11.

November 18, 2019

QotD: H.L. Mencken on “moral crusades”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.


The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic – against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming – these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.

H.L. Mencken, “Moral Indignation”, Damn! A book of calumny, 1918.

November 12, 2019

QotD: The crimes of the Righteous

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There was no mercy in them, not even those specks of humanity that can occasionally be glimpsed in the most heartless of souls. Priests, judge, scribe, and torturers acted with such rigorous coldness and distance that that was precisely what evoked the most horror. Even more blood-curdling that the suffering they were capable of inflicting was the icy determination of those know they are backed by divine and human laws and who at no moment doubt the righteousness of what they are doing.

Later, with time, I learned that although all men are capable of good and evil, the worst among them are those who, when they commit evil, do so by shielding themselves in the authority of others, in their subordination, or in the excuse of following orders. And even worse are those who believe they are justified by their God. Because in the secret dungeons of Toledo, nearly at the cost of my life, I learned that there is nothing more despicable or more dangerous than the malevolent individual who goes to sleep every night with a clear conscience. That is true evil. Especially when paired with ignorance, superstition, stupidity, or power, all of which often travel together.

And worst of all is the person who acts as exegete of The Word — whether it be from the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran, or any other book already written or yet to come. I am not fond of giving advice — no one can pound opinions into another’s head — but here is a piece that costs you nothing: Never trust a man who reads only one book.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Purity of Blood, 1997.

October 30, 2019

In case it wasn’t already obvious – “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate”

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the self-described founders of Extinction Rebellion takes to Medium to explain what the organization’s real goals are:

I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion. I was a coordinator of one of the original five working groups, and I’ve been organising with XR day-and-night since then (frugally living off my savings so I don’t have to work, having quit an industry that paid me £1000/week). And I’ve been in RisingUp (the organisation from which XR has emerged) since the first RisingUp action in November 2016. I’m a RisingUp Holding Group member, and a member of the XR Guardianship Team.

And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me “pulling rank” — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say …

And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European “civilisation” was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.

[…]

So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about “climate justice”, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.

This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and “reduce” it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not. We’re a Rebellion. And we’re rebelling to highlight and heal from the insanity that is leading to our extinction. Now tell the truth and act like it.

October 3, 2019

The Puritans, then and now

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian thinks on churchiness and churchianity in our times:

The most striking fact about the Middle Ages from a modern perspective is their love of lists, categories, forms. This is partly practical — Church art all looks the same because it has to communicate a consistent message to the aforesaid illiterate peasantry — but lots of it isn’t. They were simply obsessed with forms, with outward order, to the point that even the few true individuals were hard to tell apart — William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas were as different as two thinkers could possibly be, but unless you’re a subject matter expert, their writings look identical.

“Individuality,” on the other hand, comes from inward experience. What, if anything, did the medieval peasant believe when he went to Mass? Impossible to say, but one of the reasons that’s so is because the form of his “piety” was so all-encompassing. Some years back, a Jew wrote a funny book about trying to live his life by the letter of the Mosaic law. One could do the same thing with medieval Catholicism. Take a gander at the liturgical year — hardly a day goes by without a feast, a commemoration, a celebration. Do all of that, and you’ll hardly have time for anything else. They were so focused on the outward show, at least in part, because there was so much showing to do.

When the Reformation shitcanned all that, piety turned inward. There are zillions of sources for what the Reformed believed (or, at least, said they believed), because the Reformation was a middle-class pursuit and the middle classes were literate … and, crucially, had the free time to be literate. I’m guessing here, but since people are people and always have been, I’m pretty sure that your medieval peasant loved the show of his religion, because it gave him a little much-needed time off from his hourly grind of back-breaking, ragged-edge-of-survival physical labor.

Your middle-class incipient Calvinist, on the other hand, was bored to tears with stuff like “creeping to the cross” — all those billable hours lost (surely no one is surprised that Calvin, Knox, et al were all lawyers or merchants). In their vanity, they insisted it wasn’t enough to seem pious; you actually had to be pious, which meant putting the time you would’ve spent doing public penance into contemplating the state of your soul. Check out The New England Mind — once you fight through prose, you’ll see that the vaunted Puritan piety was little more than Special Snowflakism with a New Testament twist. They’re “individuals,” all right, but only because they’re as obsessed as Tumblrinas with their very own pwecious widdle selves.

The point of this isn’t just to bash Puritans, fun as that is (and as richly as they deserve it). The point is that, as Current Year America is a thoroughly Puritan nation, we have to realize just how historically contingent Puritanism really is in order to beat them.

Puritans desperately wanted to be individuals in a world that couldn’t support very many individuals. You need a lot of free time to be a Puritan, and in the 16th century free time was almost inconceivably expensive. Whatever else it was, Puritanism was gross conspicuous consumption — Puritans announced to the world that they alone had the free time to indulge in expensive educations, books, Bible study, and the endless hours worrying about whether or not it’s Biblically justified to paint the altar. In a world where most everyone still knows someone who knows someone who starved to death, that’s one hell of a statement.

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