I see immediately how the Sedition Act was [wildly] unconstitutional. I don’t see how the Naturalization Act, Alien Friends Act or Alien Enemies Act were unconstitutional.

None of those restricted the constitutional rights of US citizens, they merely asserted the sovereign prerogatives of citizens with regards to whether or not to admit immigrants from other lands and to determine their status once living in the US. All countries are entitled to regulate conditions of entry and requirements [including time] for aliens to achieve citizenship. Similarly, deportation or detention of enemy nationals in wartime is legitimate.

The core problem with the detention of Japanese Americans is that most of the were US citizens. If they’d all been Japanese citizens only, what the Roosevelt Administration had done would be legitimate.

Apart from what Lot and Hippopotamusdrome have already contributed, let me note the simpler point that this comparison takes the most advanced society of the Neolithic new world and compares it to one of the less advanced regions of the Iron Age old world.

A more relevant comparison would be “Yucatan 400 AD” to “Rome 400 AD” or “Constantinople 400 AD” [even better].

If you want a fairer comparison for Germania, pick a fringe region of the MesoAmerican world at the same time.

Or is there some requirement that Germania has to be the comparison? Even Hitler didn’t think the Germans were the best exemplars of the “Aryan” world at that time. He favoured the Greeks and both spoke and wrote to that effect. It might be in his table talk or Goebbels’ diaries, but somewhere there is a reference to him lightly pooh-poohing Himmler’s veneration of the German tribes.

“One of the first written languages”?

I don’t know whether the wikipedians are accurate here, but this suggests the oldest evidence for written Maya so far found is 3rd century BC, with the first translated and confirmed being 292 AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounts

Even the earlier date isn’t that good. We’ve got Latin older than that. Compared with some on that list, Latin is a modern language.

Indeed. On that, do you know of any good reference on how to do simple arithmetical operations using Roman numerals? I gather this is still known but have yet to see any guidelines. I mean how they would have done it, without having the ability to translate to Hindu-Arabic in one’s head.

Chinese males?

Zero is among the greatest advances ever made in math, the foundation of all sciences. The Mayans did good with that. Pity their technological condition among other things limited its application mostly to theory. Still something.

The Indians [Hindu and Jain divisions] who came up with it in the Old World, building perhaps a little on Egyptian and Babylonian work that may have been known to them and which was millennia older, just had a bigger world waiting to try on the concept and muck about with it.

That’s fair enough as far as the artifacts, although we have enough other information to know that the Christian teaching was that Jesus [God] died himself to seal a covenant between Man and God and open a path to an idea of salvation ultimately peaceful and life-affirming in nature, ending the need for any kind of sacrifices in ritual, and that this was for Christians the culmination of a long Jewish religious tradition in which specifically human sacrifice had been considered abhorrent and explicitly unjustified since at least the incident in which God made this point to Abraham and Isaac. So, presuming the latter actually happened in some sense, with or without actual comms from God, that would be over 2500 years pre-Contact.

I claim no specific expertise on the origin of the information, but it seems we have enough information on not only the Aztecs but also the other early-Mexican, Maya, and indeed Peruvian cultures, from sources other than only a few statues, to indicate the living practice of human sacrifice to varying degrees.

At one time, I think it was assumed that the Aztecs, though coming late to the party, were actually pro-sacrifice extremists compared to even the other practicing cultures. So we needn’t assume that every one of them kept the home fires burning all the time. I remain struck by the image of the Aztec priests frantically cutting out hearts in increasing numbers as the city fell, desperate to save the world, as they knew it.

On that, this article struck me as interesting: http://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.ca/2013/11/aztec-political-thought.html

Arguably, a cosmology equally alien to most old world polytheisms and dharmic religion as it is to Abrahamic monotheism. Although perhaps one can see its echo in some Asian shamanism, with which it shared roots. Perhaps this is even what evolves when that shamanistic tradition is left alone to develop into a complex cosmology and pantheon of gods. Regardless, perhaps the darkest idea of cosmology and political philosophy ever imagined. Imagine having this belief system and looking up at the night sky. It’s barely short of HP Lovecraft. I’d be desperate too.

http://archaeology.about.com/od/aztecarchaeology/tp/Aztec-Gods.htm

Or there’s this capsule description of the gods. Whoo-eee. Whatever else may be said of them, this culture was never going to invent either liberalism or libertarianism or worry about trigger warnings.

The statue above must have been Coatlicue, the Aztecs’ mother-deity. The lady of the skirt of serpents, necklace of human hearts and skulls, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coatlicue. I’d rather meet Nyarlathotep in a dark alley.

I don’t have any objections to the theory of multiple waves from Asia- I’m more directly aware of a couple.

One, the more or less well confirmed idea that the modern Inuit were VERY late arrivals to the North, around 1000 AD and after, and supplanting a previous Arctic culture by the usual assortment of means whether demographic, violent or technological, and arriving in Greenland long after the first Norse settlements were there. I gather they had superior spear technology and correspondingly superior hunting, boating and warring skills, and were better adapted to the rapidly cooling climate of the North in that age.

Two, the idea that there was at least one later wave of peoples into interior North America [I think the Utes and/or Navajos and/or Dene speakers [apologies for deep imprecision here- I’m no specialist on this] were the emblematic peoples of this wave. Though they were still related to and of similar origin to earlier waves, and of course here millennia before us, they were newcomers to a settled place.

Though I wasn’t really speaking of that level of deep history, which is probably still 7-8000 or more years ago.

The Aztecs/Tenocha/Mexica were late arrivals to Mexico and northern ‘barbarians’ in a much more recent sense than that. They had their origin in what is now the SW US alongside speakers of other Uto-Aztecan languages, in what to us would be the late first millennium AD. They didn’t arrive in the valley of Mexico until probably the high middle ages of our history, only a few centuries before Contact, at most. They were probably thought primitives by the people already there, since the Aztecs were neither direct descendants of nor [initially] native practitioners of the Olmec/Toltec/Teotihuacan cultural traditions. Think of how the Greeks and Romans thought of Gauls or Germans or, even, how Romanized Gauls later thought of Germans, or later how Romanized Franks thought of the Vikings. Or how the Mesopotamians thought of Persians at first, how the two of them later thought of Arabs, or how Persians and Arabs would first have thought of Turks. Or Chinese of Mongols. [History is replete with this sort of dynamic. I imagine the Igbo or Yoruba have similar views of the Hausa and Fulani right now…]

For the Aztecs allies/vassals, allying with the Spanish might be compared to the remnants of Rome summoning the Hun to get rid of the Germans, or vice versa. [The game Flavius Aetius was in fact playing for most of his life]. It doesn’t always work to one’s advantage.

Don’t know about the pre-contact numbers- I’m completely agnostic on that. I’m as open to 1 million as 25, although I am assuming 1 million is lowballing as 25 is likely exaggerating. Even 25 million isn’t that many people in such a large territory, though probably it would be pushing or exceeding the maximum possible at a Neolithic level, especially considering the environment of North America, which is harsh at the best of times and all the more so at that level of development.

On that, interesting comment about the Mississippi system. that would take significant chunks of the large heartland region out of play for sustained settlement, although note that last I heard there was no malaria in the New World prior to contact. It was an African disease that had spread throughout the old world. There may have been other swampland diseases in the pre-contact Americas, though I don’t know what they were. I always thought yellow fever was also African origin.

Admittedly, even absent those diseases, big swamps aren’t great. But they could be part of habitable larger regions if the settlements are on higher ground, especially if there aren’t insect borne diseases.

Agreed on the idea that the plains probably always had low population density. I had assumed it was essentially unfarmable at premodern levels of farming and irrigation. Hence the term ‘great American desert’ used by the early Americans, before they themselves managed to farm much of it. And it’s just as tough to use it for hunting or pastoralism without horses, so the plains indian horse cultures had to await Spanish feral horses after contact.

The true deserts of the SW did support a couple of the more advanced irrigation-based, town-building chiefdom-level cultures [the Anasazi- I forget the proper name for them now and always mix them up with their successors; just call it the pueblo cultures] but they had the Colorado river and some idea how to manage water. Perfectly respectable, albeit thousands of years behind old world early farmer chiefdoms of the levant or Anatolia, or the Nile or East Africa, or the pre-Indus culture, or pre-Shang China. But again, probably maxing out the development possibilities of their environment.

Please do more homework.

Derb has been commenting along somewhat similar lines in the 17 or so years I’ve been reading him [wow- has it been that long?], which includes the entire time he has also been a math writer.

I think there has been a slight WN shift in that time in his writing, but it’s seemed more an evolution of focus in response to outside context than any great change. You may take note that his actual attitude isn’t exactly WN and he has no apparent animus toward other races or even mixing within a country within limits, and certainly not at the individual level, as well he might not. That seems all very civil and reasonable and able to accommodate common humanity as well as the improved understandings of hbd over the last 15 years.

I imagine he might still have the same attitude on that personal level that drove his response to one Mr Schmidt many years ago.

Looked at over the broad sweep of their histories, the MesoAmerican and Peruvian cultures from the last millennium BC to Contact demonstrated probably the maximum possible scope of civilization at a stone-age level of technological development.

It could not stand up to a late iron-age culture that had developed steel weapons and armour, gunpowder weapons, and ocean-going ships. Although it might have done MUCH better if it had not lived in essentially an alien biosphere to old world germs.

What that civilization was able to achieve was, as Fred notes, not trivial. Some more interesting questions might be:

– how much more scope for accomplishment was there in the absence of moving beyond the super-Neolithic level of technology? What if anything might have been seen from them in the absence of contact? And if there had been more to come, where if anywhere was the real hard limit for a Neolithic culture? Presumably, somewhere short of industrialism. But how far short?

– Would the new world ever have made the leap beyond the stone age? Could they have? Was this indeed, as has been hypothesized, a hard limit set by the north-south geography, agricultural possibilities, climate, types of animals, and geological possibilities of the Americas?

One thing suggests that there were some hard limits. Despite the advances still being made, especially in purely intellectual areas like math and astronomy, the Americas seem mainly to have been what older anthropologists might have patronizingly called an arrested culture.

The Olmecs and earliest Maya were doing many of the same things as the early middle eastern civilizations and not so far behind them [arguably not at all, or centuries at worst, trivial on a timescale of a couple of millennia BC]. But at least in such qualities as technology and organization [metalworking, transport, ever-larger forms of social organization both political and commercial, very long distance communication and travel] the major civilization zones of the old world seemed to move far ahead of the New before the age of Augustus or the Han dynasty or the Mauryan empire.

At least at the level of survey history, it doesn’t seem like the New world civilizations moved all that far beyond the Olmecs or at least whoever built Teotihuacan in the 1000-1500 years between those times and Columbus. Whereas Hellenistic civilization or Augustan Rome were well ahead of where their parent cultures had been in 1500 BC, and the same could be said of the Middle East of the Persians, of India, and of China. And, by 1500, Classicists notwithstanding, Europe had come up with a few new things [optics, better shipbuilding and navigation] and could do as well in architecture. Still behind Rome on some fronts, but advancing in others. And India and China were similarly far more than copies of what they had been circa AD 1.

To me that’s the key questions- the limits of Neolithic civilization, and whether the Amerind peoples had pushed them to their limit; and the potential limits imposed by the geography and what that did to the potential scope of those cultures.

One last- the Indians of the eventual eastern US need to be cut some slack.

They weren’t the Aztecs, still less the Olmecs or Toltecs of old. But they pushed Neolithic culture to an interesting level themselves with the Mississippian or moundbuilder culture [these being archeology terms, not ethnonyms of the peoples].

They did not build in stone, but in earthworks and wood. But they built large settlements that were well planned. Technologically probably no better than the Celts or Germans could have done two thousand years earlier before contacted by Rome, but much better and more systematically laid out according to rational plans. And bigger than any Gaulish town by a wide margin. [Really, I think my Celtic comparison is more to give an estimate of Mississippian position relative to MesoAmerica, as Celts were to Rome, as to really compare the Mississippians to the Gauls].

They also had moderately complex religion, at least comparable to some of the earlier bronze age polytheisms of the old world, more than mere shamanism, and with some complex if potentially dark cosmological and sociological notions perhaps similar to those of MesoAmerica.

They also had complex social organization, broadly of the priest-king format or the chiefdom, anthropological generalizations usually just short of the complex monarchy or city state, and well ahead of mere tribalism.

The collapse of that culture, whether failure of its religion, harvest failure, climate change, or population collapse due to old world diseases sweeping from the south, or all of those things, had a profound effect on the region and there was definite massive population collapse. The expedition of de soto at least encountered fairly large native polities at the chiefdom level in the southeast, clear successor states. When Europeans showed up in greater numbers generations later, all had collapsed and populations were even smaller.

I’m no expert, but I gather many cultures including Seminole and Cherokee had some connections to that legacy, and even those that didn’t [Iroquoians?] were influenced by it and the remaining chiefdoms or tribal polities of much of the east were its survivors.

There’s a case to be made that Europeans settling the eastern US were operating in the equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape, far more so than the Spanish in Mexico or South America. Sobering, even to those of us with no qualms about colonization of North America.

So, like the Mexicans or Peruvians, technologically and organizationally about 1000 years or more behind their old world equivalents, though with some superior niche features comparable to or better than more advanced old world cultures, and possibly at the limits of their scope for development.

Still stone age cultures, and not about to invent steel, guns, or ocean going ships or the skills to operate them unaided. But not to be taken lightly.

Maya culture lasted a very long time, and its early phases were BC on the Christian calendar. That stage of their culture was contemporary with part of the Olmec civilization, the ur-civilization of central Mexico.

The Maya continued on, having their heyday in what was Europe’s dark ages, with their post collapse village culture surviving to meet the Spaniards and still exist today. Their language is spoken today. And contrary to early accounts, some of their city-state cultures were actually around centuries after the overall collapse of their urban civilization, still around at the arrival 0f the Spaniards. In that sense, the ending of Gibson’s Apocalypto was not entirely as implausible as some critics had it.

The Olmecs did not last so long, but were the template for all who followed in central Mexico.

The Aztecs, their last imitators, were actually late arriving ‘barbarians’ [to use a European analogy that the inhabitants of the valley of Mexico when the Aztecs showed up would likely have agreed with] from the distant north [I think they are considered kin to peoples like the Ute] who built their civilization broadly along the lines of the cultures and traditions they found, which went back to the Olmec traditions.

Think of the long arm of influence of the Egyptians or Babylonians on the traditions of the Hellenistic age, despite the reach of two thousand years.

Anyone else seen the ads running for new TV series “Pitch”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0wLCGwYZ3g

Video Link

Of course it’s all Grrl Power all the time, but the money quote starts at 0:43.

“Girls will never be able to pitch as hard as boys, not as they start growin’. It’s biology and we can’t change that. That’s why we need a secret weapon. It’s called the screwball…”

Was the technological superiority of Rome ever all that great?

[no -razib]

Organizational/institutional/training/logistics, sure, especially in the late Republic and early to middle empire. Perhaps a bit less so after the 3rd century. That logistical bit might even extend to the capacity to supply all its troops with proper kit [gladius, pili, armour, with all properly worked iron components; or their late empire equivalent equipment] where even the most advanced barbarians were less well and more variably equipped.

But technological? How much superior were Roman armaments in technology? Were their iron equipments sufficiently more durable over time or in combat to make a difference?

[no, u r right. rome won on institutions. though concrete, glass, and arches are not trivial -razib]

One guffaws.

Only two thoughts beyond that.

1. If they’d been pushing this agenda for the past 15 years, maybe. They pushed the opposite on all particulars. Too late to back out now.

2. Douthat and Salam are at pains to concede that such a nationalist politics is exclusive in one sense- it presumes the existence of an American national community and places its interests ahead of those of humanity. Well duh.

Time was properly brought up little white boys weren’t brought up to say “fuckin’” in front of people either. And any who did so in the hearing of white adults would call their quality and the quality of their parents into question.

I’m just going to assume the “white” boy and his parents never got that memo.

“You want to talk hypocrisies? Everything you trashed Mexicans for supposedly doing, you could do the same to your (presumably) Salvadoran ex-wife and your immigrant ancestors: the border-hopping, the not staying in her country to improve it, the trashing of other immigrants.”

I should have thought the part in which most immigrant ancestors of non-Mexican Americans actually came to America legally was a significant difference.

Quite right. I’m as Anglocentric as the next guy and more than most, but what definition of “western civilization” or “the west” can possibly be viable without France, Germany and Italy?

You can narrowcast by excluding the Orthodox version of East [I tend to think of them as the Eastern part of the West, for my part- they are external to the West only if you keep the frame of reference narrow]. You can even strip away the Dutch and the Spanish or the Poles, though at this point much of importance is lost. But you can’t have the West without France, Germany and Italy. France and Italy are the chief seats of Western civilization.

[I know Sonderweg theorists tried to cast Germany as something not-West, but c’mon. German cultural development is post-Roman, post-Frankish, and heavily linked to France and Italy throughout. And giving back to them as well. Germany is core-West.]

I don’t know that we disagree that much on the diversity of early America, based on your latest post. Although I would call it the far end, even relatively far out on the end, of a continuum of diversity compared with old world societies of the day. But even so, and that citation from Tolle bears it out, that was an extraordinarily narrow scope of diversity by the required standards of today- even of European ethnicities and religious traditions, that’s a very narrow list. I suspect all but the most extreme posters here would call that kind of diversity more than acceptable.

But anyone I expect to find arguing for Diversity with a capital D these last 25 years would recoil from this racist, Eurocentric idea of diversity, indeed an idea of diversity in which now-seeming trivial distinctions among NW European ethnicities and W European Christian denominations, with a handful of Jews tossed in, is a substitute for actual diversity.

I obviously did not suggest mass deportations are a viable policy. America can’t organize itself to deport people who have entered illegally, which fact to my mind implies that deportation is both just and mandatory, regardless of logistics. What I did use that idea for was to imply that many WN types might accept the definition of “diversity” as you applied it to early America, but precisely that it would be impossible to recreate that without impossible measures.

Entirely agree with you on what the definition of ‘genocide’ should require. Merely pointing out that the definition has already been expanded, by progressives, far beyond its rational meaning, and the new definition is used to great political effect. If it can be abused by the left, it can be abused in the same way by the right. That’s all I was getting at.

I must assume we have a different idea of what the scope of freedom of association is as well. So be it.

Interesting question about the scope of legislative powers, and I lack knowledge to discuss the 1965 American act, the degree of its consultation and debate, in detail. I have seen here people argue that its legislators must have known the effect it would have, and others argue they did not, and one side or the other argue that the promise it would not alter the demographic balance of the country was either a horrid mistake or a bald faced lie. I can’t say.

As a more theoretical question, I wonder. Our parliament or Britain’s also have immigration policy well within the scope of their powers. And yet there is immigration policy to bring people in who will advantage the country, and then there is ‘let’s change the nature of country in fundamental ways because it’s good and right’ on some ideological grounds. If it’s a deliberate policy to do the latter, that seems to me more a constitutive than a mere legislative power. It dilutes the ownership rights of the shareholders.

It would seem that American national policies before 1965 favoured assimilation rather than diversity. After 1965 I don’t see that it has been an unalloyed strength. I don’t preclude some strengths, merely say that they have been mixed with weaknesses. As in all other ‘diverse’ societies of history. The point being to challenged the prevailing “Diversity is Strength” meme, which is historically unsound.

Glad we can agree on that last point. It would be nice if I could anticipate a similar level of historical awareness from your average millennial commentator on the webs. Evil White Men is the faith of the times. As to the idea that white men created everything grand, nope. I don’t believe that. You’d have to exclude Egypt, Persia, Carthage, Phoenicia, Assyria, Babylonia, the Indus valley, everything else Indian, and China, and even that a truly non-exhaustive list. All stupendous, creative cultures/civilizations, many or their more or less descendants continuing to contribute.

I can’t see that the idea that white men created everything had any purchase on the culture even back when whites ran everything in the west and were at peak arrogance. Plenty of awareness even then, at least, of the civilizations of the ancient world, some enthusiasm even for the cultures of contemporary Asia. Certainly no threat now of a narrative like that taking hold.

On the other hand the notion that white men are predators and murderers who have created nothing has more purchase in the mind of youth than I care to see, even if the only issue at stake were historical truth and not my own pasty neck.

That’s quite interesting AH speculation, but it’s putting a lot of weight on that Vox piece, which was barely more elevated than, “Here’s 3 reasons why no American revolution means pictures of Jennifer Lawrence”.

Which I would totally click on.

Farage is being hyperbolic and outright dishonest on one point:

‘The EU had, “by stealth by deception, and without ever telling the truth to the British and European people, imposed political union upon them.”’

This is all out false. The EU, its predecessor EEC all the way back to the founders made no secret of this ambition. Neither has any particular step in the evolution of ever closer union been taken in secret. Every treaty is a matter of public record and was adopted in public with full debate by the sovereign member governments. In most cases, without consulting electors directly, to be sure. But constitutionally and with open public debate and information.

I suspect that many Britons, the older of whom still persist it talking about the common market as if that is all there is to it, and cannot seem to get their heads around terms like EEC, EC, or European Union, the formal names for the bodies Britain has been in since 1973, never really understood and their governments have shared the blame for that. But there has been no lie and no secrecy about the goal.

On the other hand Eurocrats and continental politicians need a whacking when they speak of the EU and “Europe” as the same thing, call unwillingness to join a single-state EU the same as unwillingness to cooperate as friends, or tout their ahistorical notion that the EU is or ever has been a vital hedge against war.

And Segolene needs a slap in the face for that odious family reference. A body of states belonging to adult citizens is not a family, and no political institution is in loco parentis to its members or its citizens. And in a free country, members of a family who want to sever ties get to do so whether their family approves or not.

But on Pat’s larger point, this was the striking bit:

“if the West wishes to remain the West.”

Plainly it does not. “Western” young people do not think of themselves as such, if they even know what that means they probably fear and hate the association.

It’s done. Give it up.

I used to say that what the young want is the society of ‘the federation’ as it appeared on earth in Star Trek. Even those who aren’t nerds, I find it a useful term. Except of course there are FAR too many white people in the federation, and far too many references to Shakespeare, Melville, Milton, too much English, too much suggestion that there is still a European civilization in the mix, and generally too much Ice People stuff. Roddenberry and his disciples look like racist reactionaries now.

Perhaps these might fairly be considered tangents, but:

1. I don’t think America in 1783 was “diverse” in the meaning that term now has. An overwhelming majority of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic white people with some subcultures of Dutch and German white people and a minority of, what, 13% black people mostly enslaved in the South looks to a 21st century person as overwhelmingly white with the blacks the only diversity, and mainly property at that. The prospect of finding some highly assimilated Jews in small numbers, or a stray Italian, or a Moorish merchant [this a favourite], makes America of that time about as diverse as England in that same era. If progressives today were willing to consider that to be sufficient diversity and call it a day, there wouldn’t be all this argument. Indeed, to get to that from where America is now would require mass deportations.

2. The term ‘white genocide’ is a misuse of the term but that ship has already sailed long ago. Nobody seems willing to limit the term genocide to require intentional mass killing with the goal of elimination any longer. It doesn’t even require killing. That would eliminate half or more of the genocides so dear to the heart of progressives.

To your main point, it is a good case. A free society requires freedom of association and a good deal of white race dialogue here kind of assumes that white people should be compelled not to associate with other races. On the other hand, freedom of association is a dead letter in America already. If white people are free to associate with other races, why would they not be free not to do so?

And you do not necessarily address the complaints you have selected. Public policy in most western countries today seems explicitly designed to introduce amounts of diversity from specific populations that did not exist a couple of generations or less ago in many countries, or to compel local communities to accept it in particular ways as a dictate from higher levels of government, without any immediate evidence in many cases that this is a voluntary process, and always in the direction of introducing ‘diversity’ to previously white environments rather than the other way around. It suggests that white environments are officially deemed the only ones in need of diversification. From progressive discourse, it would be hard not to infer that idea.

I’ve lived in comparatively diverse environments all my life. I once had a boss [born 1946 and raised in relatively diverse Montreal, albeit a diversity mostly European] who assumed that I [born Toronto 1970] needed to have diversity rubbed into my face. I had to tell him that being a kid in public school in Toronto in the 1970s meant associating with a variety of European types, South Asians in numbers, and black Canadians of Caribbean origin, with a smattering of others. A Russo-German Jew like he was would have been indistinguishable from any other white man. I have had no difficulty nor any upset with practical diversity whatsoever and don’t expect to for a while.

On the other hand, the federal government never actually consulted the electorate in the late 1960s about whether or not Canada should become a multicultural society or whether multiculturalism should become our state ideology as it now is [to the point of a shibboleth]. I suspect most Canadians now agree with it and, although I don’t, I’ve lived satisfactorily with it all my life. But I don’t know that the voters circa 1968 would have agreed, and even if they would have, no one asked them if they approved the complete transformation of their country. They had the right to say no if they preferred.

For me, it’s mostly not about diversity in everyday life. it’s the academic diversity worldview that drives me nuts, and it gains daily more ground in everyday discourse. And it’s false. Diversity as such is not necessarily strength. Certain kinds of diversity have brought economic advantages to many societies through history, always with corresponding political weaknesses. And rare has been the society that has managed it without some overarching unifying idea to balance it, or alternatively either a despotic government or government by communal leaders.

Diversity has for thousands of years been a thing to accept if it exists [usually because one’s empire has absorbed peoples] and to manage to best possible advantage with awareness of its weaknesses. It’s never been an unalloyed strength to be pursued for its own sake.

That and the whole ‘evil white men’ meme. I still can’t think of anything evil done by white men that hasn’t been done by all other kinds of men at some point.

Sooner or later, as a consequence of the diversity of everyday life and the policy tools needed to manage same without conflict, I’m going to get hauled before some tribunal for correcting someone on that otherwise academic historical point and hurting their delicate feelings. Because only white people are allowed to be insulted.

“Brits” isn’t a synonym for “English”, even if the English long used “England” and “English” when they should have said “Britain” and “British”, and some Scot nats now in return use “British” or Brit to mean “English” and exclude themselves.

Edward I was King of England. If one were to retroactively apply the term “British” to the events of that era, it would cover both sides of the war.

Also, Longshanks’ line in the movie is the more cynical “Arrows cost money…Use up the Irish”.

Side note. My parents were both Scottish-born working class of Scottish lower classes as far back as the 17th century records, so I am assuming pretty purely Scottish back to the dark ages. Dad came to Canada as a kid in 1953, my mother as a young woman in 1966. My dad thinks of himself mainly as Canadian, my mother has transitioned VERY slowly from British to Canadian. She recently told me that on a recent visit to the old country some local woman of her acquaintance and generation was taken aback by my mother identifying herself as British rather than Scottish. I told her that 50 years living in the diaspora caused her to miss some major tectonic plates shifting in Scottish identity.

That which is long divided must unite. That which is long united must divide.

So it goes.

Could you elaborate on your reference to Allen Bloom? Did you mean that his book suggested drawbacks of nationalism as applied to the US? I had not considered him in that context.

That’s true as far as it goes, but the level of linguistic/cultural commonality in the culture zones and post-feudal polity that were the kingdom of France, or the Italian peninsula, or the Spains, or the German lands of the Empire [bear in mind that technically these also constituted a German kingdom throughout 962-1806] or England, or Scotland, or the three Germanic Scandinavian countries, or even the really Polish bits of Commonwealth Poland, were all much greater than pertains to the EU right now, let alone the world.

There was enough to generate proto-nationalism in England and France in medieval times, and the aspiration to political unity in Italy in the same era. Ditto the Spains, and the idea of “German lands” was not a modern invention.

Sure, there are always debatable bits that could go either way or be fought over, whether between France and Spain or France and Germany, or parts of Germany and Poland, or would prefer to go their own way. ’twas ever thus and ever will be. But the nation states of Europe as products of early modernity were not building on nothing.

There’s a way to go yet for Europe in building those kinds of identity, farther for the world. And it usually takes some external object to speed things along.

Now, if the basic point is that the nation-state is also a political form that is a product of modernity, and its degree of harmonization and institutionalization too, then sure. But there were prior identities in existence for many of them that go back quite far.

I would think a thorough analysis of the world wars would include elements like:

WW1- nationalism of the contending states and peoples, intensified by the fact that many were newish, had irredentist claims, had borders not coincident with the ethnicity they claimed, and many had booming or at least expanding populations and economies with ambition to match, or vengeful claims from past wars, or all; new nationalisms by as yet unrealized nations; yes, the overseas imperial powers that inflated these nations’ ambitions [this is a good insight for some nations]; other kinds of lofty extranationalist or imperial ambitions and strategies to go with them [Germany’s mitteleuropa- a kind of acknowledgment that German national aspirations had to be satisfied through a quasi-postnational subjugation of its neighbours into some kind of permanent union, because they could not quite be treated like Africans]; as well as the enormous class ructions and the struggle to not only accommodate but to define ‘modernity’ as far as the nature of economy, society and polity would be concerned;

WW2- many of the forces driving WW1 still unsettled, and supplemented by the lingering grievances of the earlier war and by the full flowering of new, aggressively competing, and frankly already postnational ideologies [both Communism and National Socialism- the latter cannot wholly be understood as a phenomenon of German nationalism, not even nationalism of a militarist or reactionary sort].

The Eurocrat account of these events is so simpleminded as to be retarded, save as the tool of policy that it is.

The thing that actually gets me is that they seem not to realize the vastly greater significance of the Cold War in keeping the peace 1949-89:

1. The Cold War architecture meant the US and Soviet military presence, even in 1945-9 far too large to allow for a European war by anyone else;

2. NATO bringing US allies into one structure with integrated command from 1951, followed by the WP doing the same for the Soviet bloc, although hard to see the Soviet satellites acting independently before that

essentially making a US+ allies versus USSR+ allies the only possible war that could occur, and preventing any other by both the looming threat and by channeling militaries in such ways that mutual war was materially and organizationally impossible

And there is another factor. It’s hard to be sure now, but can anyone look at Europe in 1957 [the ECSC existed but this was the founding of the 6 party EEC], even theoretically removing the Cold War, and really believe that those western European countries would have gone to war again under almost any circumstances? There was still some rebuilding to do in places, and some had fragile finances, yet all had already had baby booms and started down the road to Americanized consumer culture prosperity. Both the negative factors [unfinished rebuilding in some countries, financial troubles, recent memory of austerity, huge death tolls to 1945] and the positive ones [baby and start of economic booms] suggested against war. Much more so than after 1918. 1945 had settled issues far more decisively, the losers were thoroughly beaten and plainly had no interest, and all of western Europe had suffered FAR more damage than from WW1.

I have a hard time believing that West Germany, Italy, 4th Republic France or Macmillan’s Britain were on any kind of path that could lead to war even by 1957. And with the transformations of the 1960s and 70s still fairly likely, EEC or no, I don’t see Europe’s path differing all that much at least as far as likelihood of war.

And of course the EU in its current form is a post- Cold War creation. There is no way that the Europe of 1993, Cold War limits removed, was going to rerun the world wars under any circumstances, whether or not the European institutions became the EU. None of those countries is materially or psychologically capable of it.

So when Eurocrats or partisans bang on about the EU as a shield against war, I question their reason.

Saw that and was equally struck. 2 women, 2 black, 1 Asian and 1 white male with thick glasses, albeit with some sort of waist-length beard. I’m going to assume that bears no meaningful relationship to the truth.

Or like the Palestinians pretending they were ever willing to share the space with the Jews, including when they could have had half of it in 1948.

Insect-like?

What people on earth are more conformist and hive-minded slaves than Americans?

Unless you meant that literally. I haven’t found any Chinese girls with antennae yet.

Avoiding those are good policy prescriptions, but only # 2 would have traditionally required a declaration of war. Any country has always been able to do all those other things in peacetime.

“Jingoism” would be all the “rah, rah, AMERICA! FREEEEEDOOOOMM!!” crap. Or its earlier British equivalent, for which the term was coined.

“These people are a pain in our ass and we are going to kill them all to eliminate that pain”, which would be the Roman, and rational, approach, is not jingoism. It is also not available to America, whose people have to feel good all the time and think they are on the side of angels instead of just on the side of themselves. The Romans believed themselves superior, but they didn’t feel it necessary to think of themselves as ‘nice’.

Besides, the original al-Qaida declaration of war on the US claimed to be justified by the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia, even though they had been invited by the Saudi king, who was considered legitimate by the Wahhabi branch of Salafism at least, were in SA peacefully for its protection against the Iraqi Baathists and Iranian Shia, and were nowhere near the holy lands of Mecca or Medina [the idea that all of KSA, a state assembled in the 1920s, is holy in its entirety is a neologism at best]. AQ was not claiming to be justified by any “invasions” by the US other than this bogus claim.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the US, at least, was wholly justified by 9/11. The Taliban may or may not have been willing to surrender AQ, and I realize they had host obligations, but by hosting them while they planned 9/11 the Taliban had given the US a valid casus belli against them by any standard. The only mistake the US made was by staying and trying to nation build. The Romans would have adopted Derb’s strategy. And it would have been justified.

Iraq was different. That was just stupid. But the jihad against America was old news by 2003.

That’s just special.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. China still cool.

Video Link

That construction worker entrance sequence appears to be what happened when they finally put the cast of Riverdance in a concentration camp.

Don’t see how it’s satanic, other than in the sense that almost any artistic evocation of industrial/mining settings is guaranteed to evoke Blake’s idea of ‘dark, satanic mills’. That would be a metaphor of a metaphor, not worship of the prince of darkness.

That second bit is more like it. Half naked rejects from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and superannuated models from Abercrombie and Fitch cavort under the direction of Stoneface the Mountain Deity. Not necessarily satanic, insofar as “Satan” only makes sense in a Judeo-Christian framework and I doubt any of these elites of modern Europe believe in Satan any more than they believe in God or Christ. Pagan, perhaps, rather than satanic, although the audience no more actually believes in ancient mountain gods either.

No one in that audience is participating in an act of worship, belief or propitiation. They’re all just sitting their with bemused expressions at the sort of claptrap they must accept as ‘art’ in order to be considered ‘cultured’.

That ceremony WAS noteworthy, though. I hadn’t thought postmodern performance art had sunk to quite such low aesthetic standards.

Wow. Perhaps the main takeaway from all this is that westerners on the internet are more open to critical appraisals of their civilization, indeed generate them [especially on Unz] than are Chinese.

Having a hard time discerning the internal logic of all that so I’m going to just ignore the first one and look at this one.

You didn’t make it clear that your ‘builder’ versus ‘destroyer’ characterization was so limited in time and space. It earlier seemed a comparison of Chinese versus European/Western civilization writ large, so I responded on those terms. I see now you mean just to compare China to the United States in the last decade or so, and with a strangely obsessive focus on one grand works project by China. Again, an extraordinarily truncated vision in both time and space.

“im amazed when he launched into a diatribe about chinese backwardness vs the western godess ”

No idea what that means. At no point did I suggest China is or has been backward. The opposite, indeed. On that last reference, did you mean “goddess” or “goodness”? I’m not into matriarchal religion so I’ll assume ‘goodness’. What does goodness have to do with anything? Just comparing civilizational accomplishments over a 2000 year timespan and noting the role of the industrial revolution. Even speculated about upcoming Chinese achievements that may be realized.

As to dick swinging, no. Merely responded to your original criticism, which included the absurd notion that China has always been a “benign country” whatever that phrase is supposed to mean.

A more generous reply than mine, and indeed that was the comparison I was making, which I thought clear.

Although I elected to add that China of today is the product of imperial conquest. Imagine if Rome had encompassed all Europe and kept reassembling itself as a conscious remake of its previous forms, and eventually somebody in whatever Helsinki would then be called commented that obviously Helsinki had always been a Latin city and part of eternal Rome. I suppose to them it would have been.

That’s a remarkable effort to narrowcast, focusing on the issue of maritime trade and exploration.

On the other hand, China of today is sitting on a vast imperial domain that may now have a Han majority, but is vastly larger than the original homeland of the peoples who called themselves Zhou, or even the combined territories of all the “warring states” of more or less Chinese people during the era of the same name.

That’s a world record duration and permanence for an empire of conquest, annexation, assimilation, and demographic repopulation. There are whole nations [Thai, Bamar Burmese, and to some extent Vietnamese] whose original homeland was within what have long since become Chinese borders.

And China made plenty of attempts to expand it later on too. They squatted on chunks of central Asia even beyond their current borders for a time.

I can see why the Ming wouldn’t devote resources to overseas expansion- they had an empire already and tributary neighbours to extort, and were admittedly then the most overall advanced society. Europe’s divided states needed to find their empires overseas.

I think there are two white countries south of Asia [Australia and New Zealand] because first Dutch and later British explorers found them where Chinese sailors had never had the gumption to look. Or Chinese the gumption [or need] to settle them. Not unlike the Americas. If China had needed to look for them and found them, they would have. And the result would have been the same. Plenty of extinct peoples who once lived in what is now China, known now only by names Chinese gave them.

You’ll get no argument about Chinese builders from me, overall. How’s that wall doing for you? But Europe need yield nothing to China in being builders, whether of societies or institutions or of physical achievements. You got a great wall and plenty of fine ancient cities and palaces. Europe has better traditional architecture.

Also, there’s those revolutions in agriculture, industry, technology, transport, etc. that Europe produced. though you did suggest gunpowder and paper money to us, so thanks. China’s still piggy-backing on and ripping off all those Western accomplishments. When you finally get to the moon I’ll concede the supremacy of your moonbase. But remember to thank all those Germans, Americans and Russians who pioneered flight and space, and salute in the general direction of the nearest American flag site.

Also, see my selected list earlier of Chinese wars and massacres. I reiterate- China knew just fine how to kill and destroy.

That could be right about the Ottomans- as a dynasty ruling continuously over the same [albeit expanding and contracting] empire, and if one counts their early days as a tiny breakaway principality of Rum, their 1299-1922/4 run of 623/5 years may be the longest such. I don’t think any historical Chinese dynasty except the Zhou got close to that.

Habsburg family power can best be dated to their acquisition of ducal Austria in 1276 when their head Rudolph was King of Germany, and their run to 1918 [equally with its vicissitudes] almost exactly parallels the Ottomans. But they were never as powerful.

Your point about China and India’s history of warfare is well noted. I am often struck by the emphasis being placed on Europe’s history of ‘constant’ warfare. Although industrialization raised the stakes, I don’t find Europe’s history of warfare all that more bloody or destructive than China’s or India’s apart from that. Both the other great regions, and the Middle East, underwent constant churn of states, dynasties and empires no less than Europe. India was just coming off one such prolonged phase when the British started their takeover, and indeed they did it by acting like just another successor state. China’s history is replete with wars fought on a scale and level of mayhem that would have made Europeans prior to the Napoleonic wars shudder. Or even 1914.

It’s just that we in the west are farther from them, and have limited understanding and sources for much of it. IIRC, the collapse of the Tang, Southern Sung, and Ming dynasties could be considered each as or more catastrophic in loss of life and property damage than the combined impact of the fall of the western Roman empire and the loss of much of the eastern one to Islam, although China probably recovered more quickly from all three than Europe and Byzantium did from theirs.

And of course the Taiping and other rebellions against the Ching racked up body counts comparable to the World Wars.

I can’t speak in detail on India on that point, but they seem to have been at it in a serious way during most centuries, especially after the arrival of Islam.

Agreed entirely on that last point. All Canadian media is a mind virus, but it is the worst.

Just about all Canadian media commentators went insane against Brexit. I don’t mean they can’t think Brexit a mistake and say so. I mean they doubled down on batsh*t when it came to economic apocalypse, racism, little England xenophobes, or whatever their angle was.

Even one Andrew McDougall, former Harper lackey and Ottawa Citizen token Conservative columnist, took a particularly crazy line. I thought he needed pills.

And then this one National Post writer, Colby Cosh, wrote something that actually took account of what country he is in:

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-britain-voted-for-brexit-because-it-wants-to-be-canada-and-we-hate-the-idea

Observing, correctly, that Canada exists because of a now 2 century-old unwillingness to pool sovereignty in a continental political union with the US, and Canadians have paid economic costs for it every day of that time.

Fellow NP writer and proud Newfoundlander Rex Murphy also took a sharp swipe at Canadian press and elites for their obvious hysteria and hypocrisy on the matter, but Cosh basically told Canadians to remember what country they are in.

That’s no doubt true, although NAFTA has the complication of being so overbalanced by the weight of one participant that it added a different dimension to those talks. Even today Germany doesn’t come close to that weight in Europe, and it was even farther from that level of pre-eminence for most of the EEC/EU’s history.

Still I give the EU members credit- they did manage to negotiate a couple of generations’ worth of treaties creating what they have created, and all that was hard work negotiation among member governments, tough even at the original six.

I only meant that if they’d kept it to a purely intergovernmental arrangement at the comparatively limited and purely economic level of NAFTA, scarce anybody in Britain would think it a threat to sovereignty or aim to leave, even if they were mad about banana standards.

In North America, we have by comparison almost no security integration, and almost all agreed separately and bilaterally, and not the same between the US and Canada as the US and Mexico. Limited military cooperation, ditto, and between the US and Canada it is much older than NAFTA and either on the basis of NATO or bilateral agreement between the two countries. LAw enforcement cooperation is largely separate and bilateral, and on the basis of sovereignty. No judicial integration or constitutional interference. [Apologies- but I don’t expect to see my country’s courts, whatever I think of them, dictated to by American judges, let alone Mexican ones, on human rights or any other matter, as European ones to the UK].

The EU is not the “military wing of NATO”.

NATO is the military alliance, and it isn’t even the military wing of the EU, at least not yet, so long as the US brings almost all the military power and still largely dictates its operations.

Strictly, Eisenhower didn’t tell them to stop playing ‘silly buggers’. He told them to stop doing things that from now on only the United States would be permitted to do.

One of the truly great and impressive acts of cynical, realist statecraft in US national interest from one of the last American presidents to understand the idea.

I don’t know who Gary He is. I’m tempted to ask “who he?”

More on point, if Europe were organized as a trade agreement among sovereign governments as NAFTA is, there would not now be Brexit. Perhaps He is unaware.

For what it’s worth, my pet theory of the world is that Europe, China, and India should be considered as geographically somewhat segregated [topographical maps help here] subcontinental civilization ‘zones’ of Eurasia, in each of which there has been a cycle of unity and disunity of states, foreign invasion, demographic churn, religious importation/invasion and, more or less, a fairly durable sense of being a cultural zone. They have interacted with one another for good and ill mainly through the central Asian heartland, whether by trade through the silk road or by the pressures they put on the nomad peoples to move around. [Willing to consider the Perso/Turkish/Arab world as a fourth, and can see a case, but can’t quite get my head around where it would end vis a vis the heartland- it’s less distinct than the other three.]

Of the three, China has had for a couple of millennia the greatest success in unifying and reunifying their imperial zone, the strongest and most durable ideology of unity going back to the Qin, and the most successful swamping of the culture zone by one ethnic group, presuming for the moment “Han” is a valid category.

The Indians have had less success, and more of it driven by foreign empires like the Mughal and the even more foreign British, but because they have a large state now encompassing much of their subcontinent and using the same name, and a sense that this is their correct identity, we have acquired the habit of retconning the past toward this outcome. [I don’t actually care to annoy Indians by questioning the idea that the 1857 rebellion was their first war of independence, and some Indians at that time actually had conceived that idea, but it’s still projecting backwards as if someone said the resolution of the Napoleonic wars at Vienna should have led to a united Europe. India had just gone through centuries of disunity and near-unity under the form of empire, against which plenty of Indians had fought and the Maratha had already destroyed, when they decided to make the Mughal emperor briefly the figurehead of a ‘nationalist’ movement I have a hard time thinking Shivaji would have recognized. If you imagine the peoples and princes of Europe rallying to overthrow Napoleon and then making one of his heirs the figurehead of a European nationalist movement against, say, Russia, you might have an approximation.]

But I digress. Europe, of the three, also had a sense of civilizational unity on various levels, but never got as far with reunifying as an empire after the 10th century, despite a lot of political theory implying that unity still existed.

All that for the mental frame in which I read this.

I guess my main question is whether or not “Han” really is a valid category, whether I have massively underestimated the persistence and significance of regional identities that either subdivide the Han or link Han in some regions with pre-existing local minority groups as against more distant Han, and how far back any of these factors go through the vicissitudes of ‘Chinese’ history, and to what degree do they represent similar lines of division across centuries.

In essence, is the fact that 90% of ‘Chinese’ are Han an inadequate determinant of the scope for China being considered a national state rather than a union of peoples/nations/states/ or what have you?

For a [somewhat deliberately simple-minded] comparison. Are the Han of China the equivalent of “Germans” in Germany or “Russians” in Russia, or can they better be compared to “Germanic” people or “Slavic” people in multiple states with their own identities, those identities having been also influenced by the presence of other local ethnic groups past or present?

Not sure why the edit engine now lets me edit, only to tell me with minutes remaining and new text in place that I can no longer edit the comment.

Also worth stressing that the lyric is “Britannia, rule the waves!”, a commandment and warning to Britons about what they must do, not “Britannia rules the waves!”, a bombastic claim to already do so. The latter would not quite have been accurate when the song was first sung. There was still the French naval rival to clear off, a task not completed until 1805.

Arguably, but only alluded to in the little heard 5th verse of the original text:

1
When Britain first, at Heaven’s commandArose from out the azure main;This was the charter of the land,And guardian angels sang this strain:”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”
2
The nations, not so blest as thee,Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;While thou shalt flourish great and free,The dread and envy of them all.”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”
3
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;As the loud blast that tears the skies,Serves but to root thy native oak.”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”
4
Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:All their attempts to bend thee down,Will but arouse thy generous flame;But work their woe, and thy renown.”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”
5
To thee belongs the rural reign;Thy cities shall with commerce shine:All thine shall be the subject main,And every shore it circles thine.”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”
6
The Muses, still with freedom found,Shall to thy happy coast repair;Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown’d,And manly hearts to guard the fair.”Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:”Britons never will be slaves.”

The rest of that better expresses the mid-18th century British self-image as defenders of freedom [their own, to be sure] against continental tyrants [in their memory, first Spain, then France] and anyone perceived as a hireling of same. And the command of the sea that prevents such tyrants from winning. All of it expressing 18th century sentiments through the medium of a play about Alfred.

Of course Britain is European. What else could it be? African?

On the other hand it is not French or German, and it has never been much good at being part of a continental union. England had excellent and close relations with the Frankish empire, but was never going to be part of it.

On the other hand ‘Anglo cultural nonsense’, along with German, Italian, and French cultures, has been at the top level of driving western history for over a thousand years now. Granted, it kicked into a higher gear in the 18th century, but it contributed a few major things pre-1000 and again in the 16th century before that.

Perfectly valid points from the perspective of anyone who considers the EU identical with the idea of “Europe” [eg phrases like “The Hour of Europe has come!!” or “We need more Europe”], who can speak idealistically of Europe as a “project” or who believes in the ideal of “ever closer union” or a single political union.

The British people may have been stupid in the 1970s not to have read the founding documents and the writings of the founders closely enough, but that’s not what they were sold back then and not what they voted for in the original referendum. Since then they have been slowly getting the picture of what continental Europeans seem to want [allegedly], realizing it’s maybe not for them, and pushing their governments to take a more nationalistic line with extremely limited success. British elites have long been of two minds, but they have in part seemed to share these sentiments when it suited them.

Today will be interesting- if this vote had been held 20 years ago leave might have won, or remain might have won because Britons hadn’t seen the worst of it yet. Now I have no idea- they’ve had 20 years more both to see the worst of the EU, to see its many current failings even on its own terms, but also to get another generation simply used to being part of it, rain or shine.

Why can’t you leave the EU without leaving NATO? There’s no precedent for leaving either, yet, but certainly no evidence for the proposition that leaving one means leaving the other. They aren’t that closely integrated and there are still countries that are members of either without being in the other.

Are you kidding? NATO makes decisions on a pretty narrow set of issues and if anything Britain carries greater relative weight in it than in the EU as one of only two European members able to do anything of military value.

The EU has a vastly greater impact on everything from the British economy to social policy to law enforcement and even on non-military national security matters.

That point about France could be somewhat true.

If Brexit is the ‘old and scared’ position, why is the entire Remain campaign based on appealing to fear? Seems to me like the Brexiters are the only ones with any sense of courage or optimism, right or wrong though they might be.

Interesting. A friend of mine really reacts viscerally to the Faith Militant in general and even the high sparrow, and I can see that as the high sparrow can be considered a religious fanatic and my friend and I both prefer to watch the world of secular-minded, scheming aristocrats using up the poor for their own amusement…

But the sparrow as presented certainly walks the walk. He lives as he believes his faith demands, including simplicity and poverty, he seems conscious of his own weaknesses, and his backstory as relayed to the queen sounded plausible as a story of an honest conversion to humility, at least. It’s all very Christian but his account of himself would sound equally plausible in a Muslim or perhaps Hindu context, and I have little doubt could fit within many religious traditions.

His manner is certainly less grim than that of his followers, but then that’s usually how they get you.

But at least he’s no hypocrite.

Barristan Selmy probably comes closest to the archetype of the noble lord in western culture, and as close to realization as that trope gets outside of the most unrealistic romances, just as Brienne represents the ideal of the wandering knight, or perhaps ronin, always seeking a master worthy of her.

Tyrion is hard to characterize. Like seemingly most viewers, he’s among my favourite characters. He’s closest to the archetype moderns want to see in ourselves- urbane, witty yet somewhat bookish, worldly-wise but with a sense of humour about it all. I think we flatter ourselves with this, but it’s an ideal of sorts.

Indeed. As I remember he could have done with a soupcon of the professionalism and calm of Scipio and the cunning of Frederick the Great.

You gotta get the components right when genetically engineering your superior warlord. They aimed for Alexander the Great and only got the parts that made Alex a hysterical neurotic.

Fun shows when I was a kid, though. And surprisingly history-minded at times.

There’s a lot of good thriller writing about ancient conspiracies and most is better written than anything by Dan Brown.

Clive Cussler when younger wrote clearer, better paced stuff that was no more preposterous, though he favoured less ideologically loaded material.

Steve Berry and a few others have whole series in which the US government or its members is embedded in dozens if not scores of parallel conspiracies concerning ancient secrets/treasures/valuable corpses. It’s not exactly Dostoyevsky but it’s better written than anything by Brown. David Gibbins as well.

Brown is the worst writer in the genre, at least among the commercially published. But boy did he hit on the mother lode. That’s a kind of cleverness.

Aw man. Beat me to it. And I’d been reading down from the top to make sure no one had.

Those cartoons were stupid in so many ways [comic was better- people got hit by all that gunfire] but I still bought the DVD 20+ years later. Some of the story concepts were clever, all the more so now we live in an era of transnational paramilitary terrorists.

Also, what other cartoon about a fake US [NOT international as in the movies] specops team would include an episode riffing on the Cthulhu mythos, in an afternoon show targeted at kids, in 1985? [ep 153 Skeletons in the Closet- the thing climbing out of the well gives the inspiration away].

Good times.

Why? He bestowed all his earthly authority on Peter…

I don’t see why he couldn’t disinherit his wife and children and endow an institution instead. Many an irritated father must have done so in history, and more wanted to.

Sorry- that last should say

If like Rome in similar circumstances the US would have divided in three and gone at it for 50 years with approximately annual presidents presiding over a giant nut house.

“You admit that right-winger politicians deporting dangerous immigrants caused the Great Depression”… Can’t see either a causal relationship or Steve suggesting one.

“Sure, real “stable,” “… Given that level of economic upheaval, unemployment, dispossession both urban and rural, internal migration, environmental collapse and further dispossession and migration out of the dust bowl, in a country spanning a continent, and generating nothing remotely resembling revolution, serious armed rebellion, or even enough diffuse/disorganized violence to pose anything remotely like a threat to the state at any level, in a country with large populations still not wholly assimilated to a common national identity or story and with large more rooted populations whose share of that identity looked in peril, America in the 1930s presents a story of stability so firmly rooted that it looks like a fantasy land. A country as described should have fallen apart. It might the next time. Sure didn’t then. Rome in similar circumstances would have divided in three and gone at it for 50 years with approximately annual presidents presiding over a giant nut house.

Broadly Anglophilic Canadian here, with two parents UK born [Scotland], long Euroskeptic from a distance…

Largely agree with all your points above. Britain is a European country and a part of European civilization without question, and it has always interacted with other countries in Europe as a part of one civilization and international ‘system’ [to be a bit modern/anachronistic]. It should and must aim to keep doing that.

But it has always stood apart in some ways, most dramatically its collective objections to being part of a larger continental polity. Sure, Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet royals were also French lords and warred with other such over their holdings, and in parts of the 100 years war the English Crown’s holders claimed to have inherited the French Crown and arguably might have aimed for a durable personal union [which I suspect would have been eventually Gallicized given France’s size and wealth]. For a while the Scots seemed willing to have a similar arrangement with France and even submit to a French occupation and regency. But these latter two cases are pretty unusual over the past millennium and map poorly onto modern statehood or identity.

Saxon England had close ties to the Carolingian empire and some cultural influence on it, but I have never read there was any notion of subjecthood to it, though England’s land had been as much a province of the older Rome as most of the rest of what the Franks claimed to have rebuilt. Those patterns of cultural/civilizational interrelationship, commercial life, yet political separateness have dominated more often than not.

I guess what I might hope for if my life had taken me back to my parents’ country would be a world in which Britain cooperates closely on economics and security with other Europeans, as a sovereign state with no commitment to unifying measures like currency or common armies [common possible commands as allies are fine, in a nod to Prince EUgene’s ghost], or political union as one state, and that Britain retain this position whether the rest of Europe remains similar sovereign nations or forms some other kind of union.

There is no need for the idea that “Europe” and the EU are identical concepts, or that disdain for the latter is denial of identity with the former. Far too much pro-EU discourse assumes the EU IS Europe. “We need more Europe…” “The Hour of Europe has come…” and other such nauseating formulations of the 1990s need to be let go.

As for the Commonwealth… nobody cares that much and hasn’t in my lifetime, at least in Canada. We looked South long ago. If the Commonwealth were a catchphrase for closer cooperation among UK, Canada, OZ and NZ I’d love that. I wouldn’t expect or desire, nor see a need for, it to be anything like as close as the EU. But it would be a recovery of a strand of Canadian identity that was supported as late as the 1950s and could now be taken off the shelf and dusted off by a more confident Canada, with fewer old liberal diehards [always white and Anglo] clutching skirts and fearing we were being “neocolonial” and subjecting ourselves to Britain.

I just would be willing to eschew the term “Commonwealth” if necessary to avoid having to include any other countries currently in that group. Conrad Black wants India in as well, and I sympathize, not at all minding Indians on the whole and it would lend some clout. But I wouldn’t want all India’s demographic, economic, social and strategic problems.

A superb vision, and maybe what some Britons thought they were signing up to in 1973 [at least for the European area], since all they heard about was the “common market” and seemingly rarely if ever the “European Economic Community” that it was actually called. Perhaps I have imbibed biased memory, but it seems to me most ordinary Britons I ever met who were adults then never lost the habit of calling it the “common market” and never tracked its evolution from EEC to EC to European Union, nor were really aware of the more or less explicit endgame of political union encoded on the EEC’s first day in 1957.

If it had just been a common market, then [cautiously] that would have been great.

The downside is that some of the stuff ordinary Brits and the Daily Mail find most offensive in EU diktat are actually the stuff made necessary for a true common market- the common standards and regs, labour rules, labour mobility, etc. I suppose if these were framed all along as intergovernmental agreements rather than orders from “Brussels”, they might have been more acceptable to Britons as workings of the common market and seen less as authoritarianism. But, of course, they WERE intergovernmental agreements if only because that’s how the EU seems really to work. Brussels was the general staff and policy secretariat, not the ruler.

I’m not sure the Punic analogy holds.

Taking the longer view, Carthage had been a peer competitor of Rome for over a century before it was destroyed, and at the start of their rivalry Carthage was the older, richer, larger, and more powerful big dog, which had organized the western Mediterranean basin largely to its advantage and had many of the Greek colonies as allies, and Rome the rising upstart power that had just secured its own hinterland in Italy.

Their clash in the first war was one between rough equals over a divided sphere of influence, in which Rome was the newcomer feeling its oats. That would make Sicily and its surrounding waters the equivalent of the South China Sea, with Rome as China.

In the second war, Rome had beaten Carthage and reduced it to strategically weaker position but it was still powerful, rich, commanded fleet and army, and had gained a new empire in Spain, making it still an equal contest in sufficient ways.

In the third war taken in isolation, your analogy is better but there is the opposite problem- Carthage was much weaker than Rome by then and if Rome is to be cast as the US, then Carthage better fits Japan circa 1985 than China now. Perhaps more seriously, I would suggest that any analogy should not take the third war in isolation but needs to take the whole competition between Rome and Carthage into account as I suggest above. Rome was not an old power crushing a rising rival, but the risen power finishing off the former leader of the regional interstate system.

That would suggest an analogy to what China [Rome] does to the US [Carthage] a century or so from now, presuming China does continue to rise, does aspire to be the leader of the world system, and there is still a US in 2116 [all debatable propositions, especially the degree to which China would even want to take on the role of the US at all or have any desire to eliminate its statehood and culture let alone peoples- as nuisances perhaps, but I don’t get the impression of them as genocidal global imperialists. They just want to rule Italy, control its surrounding waters, and dictate the management of neighbouring states, so to speak].

Quite agree with all that. I would, though, appreciate the Chinese not whining indefinitely about that incident. The US doesn’t whine to Britain about the burning of the White House, nor am I aware of many other countries still complaining about that kind of behaviour after 200 years. Plenty of sackings and burnings in conflicts elsewhere in the early 19th century too. I appreciate China’s sense of its own longevity, but there need to be limits.

Well I know too little about the larger processes by which the Han people sinicized so much larger an area than their original Yellow river/northern plain homelands, but assume it to have been a complicated process of warring, colonization and cultural assimilation by which the south came to be so elementally Chinese, if still a cluster of regional cultures and much smaller minorities. That’s just iron-age imperial success in its most magnificent form.

But Chinese military history from the warring states through most imperial dynasties offers many examples of war waged to the utmost of iron-age capabilities, with the aim of wholly eliminating rival states and their social systems [when not the same as the victor], large scale massacre, sacking, depopulation or removals, the works. And casualty levels to back it up. I gather the Yuan conquest of Sung [I am aware Mongols were not Chinese- I wouldn’t want to claim the Han are the only ones capable of all this; but Yuan is a part of the recognized history of the Chinese state] teetered on the edge of being a genocidal war as a matter of policy, and certainly stacked up appropriate death tolls in practice. The more ancient Han war against the Xiongnu ultimately worked best when waged with large scale demographic goals in mind.

None of which makes it total war by modern standards- they didn’t have the kit for that yet. But it was some of the best total war possible for a preindustrial civilization.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean they had a “thirst for total war”. That notion is ridiculous. They just had a long history of very advanced civilization and large populations available to kill or be killed at need using all the abilities of that civilization. Respect.

France was the rising power of the 17th century and the top dog of the 18th. The profound social, political and military innovations of the revolution and Napoleonic eras gave them one last over the top hurrah to make a bid for hegemony that outstripped the dreams of Louis XIV by a wide margin.

From 1815, France was a declining power. It was not especially obvious for the first generation or so as the concert system gave them a huge role, but:

1. The dominant powers in Europe diplomatically and financially were Britain and Russia prior to the Crimean war, with Britain becoming the paymaster of liberal powers [often including France] and Russia the backer of the various Holy Alliance or holy alliance like systems in the centre and east. The Metternich system of Austria/Germany was underwritten by Russian power. Prussia in those years was arguably a Russian satellite state. These systems were not stable, but the relationships kept following this pattern until the diplomatic crisis of the 1850s saw Britain and France rally to Turkey’s side and beat Russia in battle, pushing Russia out of its top chair and largely out of diplomatic play for much of a generation.

2. After that, Russia returned to a major place at first by its renewed alliance with Prussia/Germany, by then the new emerging power. At this time France’s decline had started to become obvious, had started driving its panicky and strategically defensive policies [this did not preclude provocations- they were not clever], and all of this became crystal clear in 1870-71. Later, when Russia allied with France against Germany, there was a case to be made that both Russia and France needed to ally against Germany, the rising power. There was also a case that Russia was a rising power itself [this was the German fear, and plausible]. France was the declining power that needed help to get revenge.

3. France was able to build a much larger colonial empire than before. But there are two considerations. In part, this was a replacement for by then unfeasible European ambitions that France recognized it could not longer aspire to. It was also possible only because in doing so France was now operating largely within a British dominated international system and part of a colonialist race in which the British sanctioned other powers doing so but were very far ahead themselves. France clashed with them, negotiations were made, and overall the big picture went Britain’s way. In the 18th century, by contrast, France had been contending with Britain for supremacy from the Americas to the Mediterranean to India, and in Europe Britain was scrambling to pay allies to contain French power.

The Napoleonic wars cost France hugely in money, resources and above all manpower, and started it down a road of demographic decline- France had hit 20 million in Louis XIV’s reign, and was well into the 18th century or more the most populous country in Europe. It outstripped even the population of the vast Russian empire until later than one might think [sucker was empty compared to today]. France’s population growth in the 19th century was much much weaker and incomparable to the huge population gains of Russia, Germany, or Britain. And, similarly, its industrialization was later, slower and more haphazard than Britain or Germany.

France has been playing strategic and geopolitical defence, scrambling for allies to do it, for 200 years. They have not always done badly, of course. But their greatest success was WW1, and the means required ultimately ended up being an even bigger demographic and cultural own-goal.

Funny thing, I discovered a few years ago I quite like cottage cheese, by itself or with a side of cherry tomatoes.

But as a mixer, hooooghhh!

The thing I seem to remember about the jello salads was the pieces of fruit that hung suspended in the jello of some such, usually green grapes floating, like little grapey astronauts lost in gelatinous space. Poetic.

I am very sad to see someone beat me to the true name of canola- rapeseed. The hatefulest of all cooking oils.

I visited Alberta some years ago and drove a rental car from the Edmonton airport through the city and up to the big military base north of town.

In all that driving I was assaulted by a peculiar smell- unpleasant, but only mildly so. Its vagueness meant I was kept guessing- some kind of new car offgassing from the side panels or interior furnishing; some fertilizer smell from the fields [it did not smell like any fertilizer I remembered from Ontario farming country though]; or something from the oil industry?

Nope. Years later I asked a friend who was from Alberta. She said it’s a smell canola gets when ripe or maybe slightly overripe in the field. Or something like that. Apparently canola is the other big Alberta oil industry, and vast fields of it support Alberta agribusiness.

Pee-ew.

Funny about the sandwiches- I learned the habit of always buttering a sandwich from my parents, even when other condiments might be applied. I have somewhat stopped that, but for years unbuttered bread seemed weird. The buttering may be a British thing, as both my parents were. Can’t say for sure- I thought most of the Anglo-Canadian kids I knew had the same experience.

Here’s a Britishism though- bread and jam except with jam AND butter. It’s always experimental and to personal taste, but if you get it right butter and strawberry jam is a sublime if unhealthy snack. Butter is laid down first, always. Not one side butter and the other jam, as some do with PBJ. Butter and then jam both sides, eaten open faced. [Insert Homer Simpson drool effect here.] It’s been years…

When I first came to Ottawa, I found our work cafeteria reverts to mayo as grease of choice, although they have lately rediscovered butter. The idea of mayo as default butter spread rather than selective sauce for specific sandwich fillings struck me as gross in the extreme. I assume it was a Quebec thing. They are weird people.

I did not know that was law in Ontario too.

Although, in retrospect, I don’t think my mother ever actually bought margarine. I remember plenty of butter in its wrapped, frozen brick form, having to be brought out and sliced into a butter dish to soften before the meal. Or sometimes a segment kept in a dish on the counter all day for use.

She probably thought margarine was “common”.

Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food was an eye-opener for me when I first saw it, and a huge laugh.

I was born 1970 and by then my mother had a big pile of cookbooks that had started to incorporate all sorts of lasagne ripoffs and casseroles, and overly sweet sweet and sour dishes which were good to me then- cooking had indeed moved on and started to take on some variety from imported styles. Not a lot. The casserole era was not all bad but it was plain. And it had dropped a lot of the stuff Lileks mocks, at least as far as my house was concerned.

On the other hand, my mother and father between them were an excellent tag team for hams, turkeys, chickens, roast beefs, and BBQ items, all with perfectly good potatoes and veg. Plenty of seasonings and sauces available, though fewer than now. Nobody in Ontario had heard of hot sauce. We were not a big ketchup house. There was some- I hated it as a kid but dad liked it on occasion. My dad did the best home made burgers, both assembly and spicing and then grilling. Sorry. It’s 8pm and I haven’t had dinner.

But I remember jellied “salads” from cookouts with family and friends. Tasty for kids, but eeewwww. They hadn’t gone from the scene entirely.

I think Anglo food, even in North America, was simple/plain but pretty natural and good before the food industry really got its technology going and postwar prosperity got people’s wallets open. I remember some frozen foods and tv dinners, though mom was no fan of them and didn’t really see the need to have frequent resort to them. I enjoyed a few brands of meat pies though- Swansons were OK.

If we had never had mass immigration-based food, we’d have gone back to the old standards, the kinds of things I suggested above. They were good meals.

Quebec’s corrupt dairy oligopoly enforced a rule like that until fairly recently. All my French-Canadian friends and colleagues over the years had memories of some disgusting grey crap.

I sympathize with the dairy people wanting to emphasize the alien revulsion one should feel eating such a gross concoction, but if Canada were going to allow the sale of it at all we should have allowed the makers to make it more appealing.

There’s a series of ads running for “Boost Nutritional Drink”:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7PLh/boost-complete-nutritional-drink-on-the-move

In this example, as others, the voiceover emphasizes how he is busy all the time and not eating like he should, and after a brief pause says, “So I drink Boost…” or in some cases “That’s why I drink Boost”.

Needless to say, the first time I heard this I would have sworn he said “booze”. And that’s now what I hear every single time one of these ads is aired.

“I’m on the move all day, and I’m not eating as well as I should. That’s why I drink booze.”

The media has developed a pretty good line in that tactic in recent years- peddling weird international in-crowd speak for issues and expecting everyone to get it right away.

On one hand, I see their point. A man who expects to be POTUS in January should be aware of major issues currently roiling a rich and allied region of the world, and should have heard even that sort of jargon enough times in the briefings he should be getting by now from his own team to have them click in his head.

On the other hand, I know well that plenty of intelligent, even informed people do not think of issues in terms of poseur jargon and it goes right past them. Whether that should be true of brexit is hard to say- nobody refers to the issue without the nickname, ever.

It’s a pity. First it was Grexit, now Brexit. There’s something about jargony Economist-speak [I don’t think they invented either term, but they are major popularizers] that boils my blood and always has.

The demographics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be an enormous improvement over the emerging demographics of the New Europe. If the only Muslims were quietist and civilized Bosnians and the worst threat of underground violence was Orthodox Serbs, Europe would be better off than it is today, let alone where it’s going.

No issue with your wider points but a couple of minor corrections:

the 1/5 figure or other large percentage estimates for death toll of the 30 years war is usually for the territories that served as the war zone- more or less identical with the Holy Roman Empire and, more loosely, the German lands. I’ve even seen higher figures in older sources for that.

But it’s far from 1/5 of all Christians at the time, even western Christians. France and Sweden, the two most important non-German combatants, saw significant military casualties but not really a lot of war-related civilian deaths as they were not being contested on home ground. France had by far the largest population in Europe and in Western Christendom at the time, not significantly affected.

I’m curious about that author’s emphasis on the ‘premodern political and religious sentiment’- yes, but not exclusively. France intervened on the Protestant side for reasons of pure secular statecraft [its goal was to undermine Habsburg Austrian power and Imperial unity] and by doing so more or less doubled the length and carnage of the war.

Similarly, most of the wars of western Europe from that point on had only a trivial religious element if any- the wars of Louis XIV to expand, and of others to contain him, sort of lined up Protestants on the anti-French side but usually with Catholic Austria opposing. The 18th century wars were pure secularism, including the Seven Years War [important for me as the military birth pangs of what would become Canada and the US, but also the biggest war of the century in Europe prior to the French Revolutionary Wars].

Of course, to the extent your point is that Christendom sort of turned off the sectarian war machine after 1648 and chose other paths of conflict, and Islam has not done this yet, fair enough. Many have loosely and casually compared what is happening now to Islam as its 30 years war, at least insofar as it is blending together sectarian fanaticism with motives of ethnic and tribal antipathy, and the cynical statecraft of various powers, to produce change on a scale unseen for centuries.

May this time last much less than 30 years, and do less harm, for everyone’s sake.

I also disagreed with Bill Jones on a couple of points but, to be fair, the French had built quite a large European population in Algeria’s north [the departments which were annexed directly to France] and the Italians were trying in Libya.

Both actually would have had a chance of building settler colonies if they had had more time, larger populations to draw on, and the Arab/Berber populations hadn’t boomed. Italians in Libya were never much of a percentage I don’t think, but the country was pretty underpopulated with its own natives.

Thanks for this info and video.

I am loosely aware of these things, but not at all familiar with the many different traditions and practices.

I would watch that if Chris Rock is cast as Captain Kirk.

Space… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the USS Panther. The only ship in space with only one engine, cause that’s all the MAN would give us…

There may be some silliness in the official history, but you seem to be implying that the fact that the US’ main ally has changed since the 1940s is part of it. I don’t see why. That’s how history, geopolitics, and the human condition in general have always worked. There are few long-term alliances, and none forever. When the alliances are based solely on common interests and nothing else, they will be as long as those interests in common and no longer.

A naval blockade of a country’s ports or direct interdiction of its shipping at sea is an act of war. It involves actual or implied violence, as well as interdiction of a country’s waters and violation of the freedom of the seas.

An oil embargo or any other kind of trade embargo is, however, not an act or war or a “clear declaration of war” and appears to be nowhere so regarded outside of Pearl Harbour circles. The US was not under any obligation to sell oil or anything else to Japan. It was a clearly aggressive diplomatic move but such moves have never, before or since, been regarded as a casus belli.

Arguably, the freezing of Japanese assets in the US in the summer of 1941 was a much more aggressive diplomatic move, but freezing of foreign assets in one’s country has never been regarded as a casus belli either, and still is not.

Also, the oil embargo was imposed after Japan invaded French Indochina, a violation of French sovereignty, in order to enforce its own embargo on imports entering China. Japan’s embargo move involve actual invasion of a third country, with casualties and everything. Not a casus belli for the United States in any way. But a perfectly valid reason for America’s own embargo.

I saw impulse control mentioned above a couple of times. I may not be the most alpha of men but I’ve known all types and I’ve seen some of the kinds of impulse control failure a man can have.

I’ve also known women.

They may be more socially controlled or controlled in social situations, though I have my doubts outside a pretty narrow set of behaviours. But I refuse to believe that women have better impulse control overall than men.

In one old Star Trek episode the sentient robot Nomad scanned Uhura’s brain. It asked Kirk for clarification why this “unit” was different from other human units. Kirk replied she is a woman. The robot replies “A mass of conflicting impulses”.

Mad Men era mild misogyny aside, I have seen women at all levels of capable professionalism, but I’ve never seen anything to prove Nomad wrong.

As I read that National Gallery scenario I could hear Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons with her trademark scream “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!!!”

Well, FWIW I’ve enjoyed, been informed and largely agreed or at least sympathized with your inputs on this.

Kirk also told Crater that “You bleed too much… you’re too pure and noble”.

Shatner put some really sweet sneer into that line. It was, in retrospect, a Trumpian moment.

I remember that. Along with the undisguised end of the Cold War Gorbachev-worship, it was one of the many flaws in what was otherwise one of the better Star Trek adventures.

Even at the age of 20 or so I thought that bit stupid. The Federation in Star Trek was never a homo sapiens only club. If anything it was way too vibrant and happy about it. Other than the elf-clone Vulcans, who were super smart and snotty about their religion masquerading as “logic”, most of the non-human races in the Federation were useless.

I could just about tolerate him but never watched for pleasure- just accident of not changing channel fast enough. Could never stand Colbert.

Do yourself a favor and don’t watch Stewart protégée Samantha Bee. I cannot find web-appropriate words for my reaction to her stuff, but it’s not good.

Yes, the Roosevelt Administration and it’s cadre of New Dealers wildly violated the rights of born or naturalized US citizens of Japanese ancestry when they interned them without cause and took their property. Not exactly gas chambers or gulags worthy of national rending of garments all these years later, but FDR’s people definitely were in the wrong.

Nothing wrong with it for any who were Japanese citizens and not also US citizens, of course, that’s just properly neutralizing enemy nationals so long as you don’t hurt them. But for those who were US citizens, you bet.

For the other listed item that catches my eye, I don’t know what you mean. I can’t see any unacceptable treatment of “Muslims” happening. You mean individuals in the US are banding together to beat up Muslim neighbors or something? More than the usual multiracial background noise of thuggism that always goes on, and seems to consistently target Jews more than Muslims? DO you mean those Muslim Bosnians getting stabbed by black people?

Maybe I’m just willing to tolerate a little more nonsense in a free society, as long as any actual crimes get actioned [at a discount for blacks of course].

If you’re talking about the centuries long horrors perpetrated by white people, I can’t think of a single thing white people have done to Muslims, or to anyone else, or even to other white people, that has not been done repeatedly to white people by Muslims. War, conquest, colonialism, displacement, rape, slavery, you name it.

Where have you been?

Also, would really love to see a major television event telling the story of any episodes of the thousand year slave trades to the Arab Caliphate, Ottoman Empire and Barbary states, the millennium long Muslim attempts to conquer first western and then eastern/central Europe. Or even the Arab slave trade in eastern Africa. Or, let’s be realistic, noting that Europeans were just enthusiastic buyers in the slave trade of West Africa that was centuries old at that point and run, as always, by Africans for the enrichment of other Africans.

People of Color can rise all they like if they manage it without my money or any more whingeing. But they don’t get to make themselves feel better by saying white people have done things alone when all others have acted the same in their turn.

You’ve listed 7 categories of Hill supporters, of which at least 6 spend all their time whining and living off Uncle Sugar or cajoling Uncle Sugar to kick whitey in the balls and take his stuff and give it to them instead. How is that not ‘failing at life’?

I take it my reductionist approach will not be considered adequate by either side-

1. I am physically and, I am forced to presume, genetically male.

2. Therefore by definition I am 100% masculine. No other answer is possible short of hermaphroditism, which on inspection I do not appear to have. I could go in for another look, but I’m not currently at home alone so decorum is called for.

3. Therefore all my physical qualities, personality quirks and behavioral traits by definition fall within the male spectrum of possibility and can be considered masculine traits, even if they are also feminine traits available to women. Call them human traits.

4. I therefore do not understand what these hermaphrodite poll responders are talking about.