Tag: history

A battered woman, still whining

Instead of simply admitting that she was wrong when she erroneously claimed that a BBC propaganda piece aimed at children was “pretty accurate”, UK “historian” Mary Beard is continuing to cry, and her supporters are continuing to move the goalposts as they attempt to salvage her tattered reputation.
Mary Beard@wmarybeard
It’sreally hard. & I am more battered than I seem.Just think I haven’t been paid to research Rome for 40 yrs to sit and let this crap go by!
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Then you should stop acting as a BBC-owned diversity propagandist. You are already a laughingstock outside the UK.

History and the limits of SJW dishonesty

Don’t bother looking for the limits of SJW stupidity or dishonesty. You will not find them. In an astonishingly inept attempt to defend the BBC and “historian” Mary Beard, one English SJW actually put forward the following defense, accompanied by a screenshot.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
I answered your question. Even though it was a straw man. No one ever said mixed race families were typical (majority) of Roman Britain.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
The BBC cartoon did not say “typical”. It merely suggested one such family as possible. Which it was.
This was the screenshot attached to the second tweet.

In fairness, the SJW was undermined by the dishonesty of the BBC, which is the more significant aspect of this little story. You see, this was how the video was described 5 days ago, before BBC “historian” Mary Beard tried to school Paul Joseph Watson and was caught bullshitting by NN Taleb. Emphasis added.
Original BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain is shown through the eyes of a typical family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while the son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion, food and entertainment.

Current BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain as seen through the eyes of one family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while his son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion.
You see, with SJWs, it’s Fake News and Fake History all the way down. You can NEVER trust anything they say. Because – all together now – SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

The whining continues

English “historian” Mary Beard is still whining about the pushback she received for incorrectly claiming that a multiracial Roman British family was “typical”, as portrayed in a BBC children’s cartoon.

Mary Beard has spoken about the “Twitterstorm” of abuse she received after arguing that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse.

The historian and television presenter said she received a “torrent of aggressive insults” for days after she said a BBC schools video that depicted a high-ranking solider and a father of a Roman Britain family as being black to be “pretty accurate”.

She argued that the character in the BBC cartoon was loosely based on “Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain.”

She spoke against the “rubbish” arguments about genetic evidence from alt-right commentators and their “desire for certainty” when it came to historical information that was not always possible to ascertain, such as the population of Britain during the Roman empire and the ethnic make-up.

“It also feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war not debate (and that includes one senior academic),” she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. She was referring to comments from  Nicholas Nassim Taleb who accused her of “bullsh*tting”.

I don’t think her new book is going to help restore her reputation any time soon. Best response: “It would explain all the dead white wives.”

In the meantime, Cambridge University has doubled down and released a Faculty Statement.


Faculty statement responding to the online debate of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain

Roman Britain has long been an important part of the teaching and research in the Faculty of Classics. The question of ethnic diversity in the province has been getting unusual amounts of attention recently. Professor Mary Beard has been at the centre of some of this attention. In the Faculty we welcome and encourage public interest in, and reasoned debate about, the ancient world, such as Professor Beard has always sought to encourage. The evidence is in fact overwhelming that Roman Britain was indeed a multi-ethnic society. This was not, of course, evenly spread through the province, and it would have been infinitely more noticeable — it can be assumed — in an urban or military context than in a rural one. There are, however, still significant gaps in our understanding. New scientific evidence (including but not limited to genetic data) offers exciting ways forward, but it needs to be interpreted carefully.

UPDATE: Glorious. Mary has really become quite prolific of late. We need to send old GRR Martin a case of whatever she’s drinking.

Something is broken

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is underwhelmed with the state of the UK intellectual sphere after his encounter with “historian” Mary Beard:

The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy.

What was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Britain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time.

  • Representativeness heuristic. The picture was portrayed as representative (playing on the representativeness/avalability heuristic in the minds of children). Some people backtracked later by saying it is was not common but not impossible, which is where I shout “BS!”
  • Anecdotal vs Statistical. The backup is mostly anecdotal from cherry picked stories. We find nothing beyond traces of sub-Saharan genes in areas where Roman legions were located (France, Gaul, and even Spain, where most of it came much later from the Arab trade). Show the picture to a French or Italian person and tell him “this is the typical…” and watch the insults.
  • Fuzzy classification. Even the researchers who deal with physical remains miss the point that people from North Africa looked no different from Spaniards, S. Italians, and Greeks. Punics/Phoenicians we now know looked Canaanite, just like a Southern European. Berbers looked like mountain berbers today. So representing “diversity” should focus on the difference between locals and Romans, not within Romans. It would be like mixing English and Spaniards/S. Italians, which makes sense.

The reclassification “when it fits” is nothing short of fabrication.

Mary Beard, of course, fled from the obvious consequences of her own arguments when I pointed out to her that her advocacy of ethnic diversity, combined with her observation that the Roman mass rape of the Sabine Women was “a way of creating a mixed society”, amounted to an implied endorsement of the mass rapes of Rotherham.

English academics are third-rate intellects, which, sadly enough, puts them a leg up on most of their American counterparts. That being said, I still have a lot of respect for Ms Beard, whose take on history is certainly original, if nothing else.

I know I’m definitely looking forward to her first book on Carthaginian history, which promises to be truly ground-breaking in light of her discovery of considerably more ethnic diversity there than had been hitherto suspected.

Repealing the Zeroth Amendment

The Trump Administration has taken the unprecedented step of pointing out that a propaganda poem is not actually U.S. Federal law. The media, naturally, is astonished by this extremism.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller found himself clashing with CNN correspondent Jim Acosta at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.

“What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,'” Acosta said, quoting from the poem The New Colossus, which was inscribed on the statue after its erection.

“It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or be a computer programmer,” Acosta continued. “Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you are telling them you have  to speak English? Can’t people learn to speak English when they get here?”

Miller pointed out that English is already a requirement of naturalization.

“The notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of an immigration system would actually be very ahistorical,” he said.

Miller further rejected Acosta’s reference to the Statue of Liberty, noting that the poem Acosta had cited was added later.

A French statue with a Jewish poem subsequently attached is neither U.S. law nor American tradition. This is the new law.

THE THIRD COLOSSUS

The Lady of Liberty is not a French whore,
We have endured enough; we don’t want any more.
Don’t give us your tired, your poor huddled masses,
Your refugee refuse of conflict and lack.
They may be the finest of your foreign classes,
But nevertheless, they have to go back!

And not only Britain

Peter Brimelow isn’t mourning the societies we have lost. He wants revenge:

In 1940, my father, already in the British Army in which he was to spend 6½ years, was stationed on the English Channel at Folkstone, looking right at Dunkirk. Years later, reading about the German plans for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, I realized he was right where paratroopers were to land and asked him what kind of resistance his unit would have been able to mount.

He said: “They would have had to give us rifles.”

The Germans never came—but Britain was invaded anyway. By 1990, when my father died, he was bitterly in agreement with Pringle’s interviewees: it wasn’t worth it.

My considered reaction to Dunkirk: People should be hung from lampposts—they should be burned alive—for what they’ve done to Britain.

God send, if only for the sake of my three little daughters, born almost exactly 100 years after my father, that America can be saved from this terrible fate.

I could not possibly agree more. And I have no doubt that there will be a reckoning one day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

In a day when young girls are raped, not once, but twice, by the non-Western immigrants that are culturally enriching our societies, it is absolutely astonishing that the men of the West continue to meekly endure these daily atrocities.

True diversity is national

As is the case with so many things, the Diversity being pushed on the nations of the West is a lie, a false and evil version of the true diversity that can only be preserved through the various peoples of the world remainingly firmly and determinedly distinct:

By marrying and moving into another culture, the women of It’ll Never Last tried their best to join another nation, and their failure to do so illustrates, rather gloriously, that mankind is still diverse. Our differences don’t just reflect our ideals but define our autonomy.

Far from promising peace, those who sing of no countries are really threatening us all with unspeakable violence, psychic and physical.

An empire, by nature, must trample on nationhood, even its own, for it presents the empire’s ambitions as the nation’s necessities, for how else can you get Americans, for example, to go die and fight in Afghanistan or Iraq? Though citing love of nation constantly, our Washington rulers are essentially anti-American, and that’s why a genuine nationalist like Edward Snowden must flee to Russia.

Nationalism is simply the love of one’s language, culture, history and heritage, one’s very identity in short, but as wielded by an empire, nationalism becomes a murderous tool to violate one nation after another. The American empire is destroying the American nation.

You really have to watch at least a few moments of the film mentioned, and linked, in the article quoted above. There really is something observably wrong with women who go that far outside their own culture; you can observe the crazy eyes even before they open their mouths and confirm the observation.

With a few evil exceptions, there is nothing good or beautiful about the destruction of a people and their erasure from history through assimilation. The Israelis understand this, for as Martin van Creveld’s wife Dvora once told me, the two greatest dangers to the Jews are a) that they will be hated, and b) that they will be too well loved.

Is this what you wanted, Ms Pankhurst?

Moral abandon, rape, foreign invasion, and the defeat and occupation of England by the Franco-German Union, complete with annual payments of tribute. What a stupid, evil woman. If the anti-suffragettes of the day had had even a modicum of a glimmer of a true understanding of what the price of women’s suffrage would be for England, they would have executed the lot of them faster than the Chinese government’s crackdown on democracy activists at Tianenman Square.

How appropriate that some of the suffragettes wore head scarves. Very forward-thinking indeed.

The Proposition Left

And the white Left is gradually beginning to realize that they have made a fatal blunder in declaring the white Christian West their enemy, as there is no place for them in the various tribes of the global South and East:

It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.

The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized….

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.

It’s an impressive feat of intellectual gymnastics that the author is attempting. He’s essentially doing the equivalent of declaring that Democrats are the real racists: the Alt-Right are the real enemies of the West. But that is not true. Indeed, the Alt-Right are the only defenders of the West.

It’s become fairly common for conservatives andthe  Alt-Lite like to play rhetorical games and try to claim that the Alt-Right is really the SJW Left because word salad. But notice how similar this Left-wing argument is to the arguments of the conservative Proposition Nationalists and the Alt-Lite civic nationalists addressing the Alt-Right.

This is why I keep pointing out that the Alt-Right is inevitable. You can play all the word games you like. You can cherry-pick whatever historical documents you like. You can invent whatever contorted and ahistorical definitions you like. You can quote at length from the red-letter edition of the True Sayings of Judeo-Christ. But in the end, so long as you continue to deny that a nation is a group of people related by blood, language, and tradition, and deny that the West is a civilization constructed by, of, and for European Christians, you will end up precisely where the Left is, because a first step into falsehood is always followed by a second, and a third, as your perspective increasingly comes into conflict with observable events.

This is called “missing the point”

The irony, it burns.

It’s sobering to consider the degree to which we have lost our knowledge of and connection to our American heritage. As a result, William B. Allen notes that we have been transitioning increasingly from a society of “independent yeomen” to a society of “wards of the state.” The challenge before us is to determine whether we can rediscover our heritage, and relearn the requirements for becoming good and free citizens while also reclaiming the sovereignty we have ceded to the state.

The first step toward recovery, after our recent celebration of the 241st anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, is to remind ourselves of its unique proposition that because we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, equality and our common commitment to the political implications of that equality—not race and blood—are the founding principles of our nation.

We’ve lost our knowledge of and connection to American heritage because many, if not most, US citizens are not Americans by any definition except paperwork. It shouldn’t be surprising that Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and Chinese never had any interest or ability to transform themselves into the independent yeomen who historically existed only in England prior to the establishment of the United States by predominantly English settlers.

You cannot rediscover a heritage that isn’t yours. You can’t become “American” by a sheer effort of will any more than you can become “Japanese” or “Jewish” that way, no matter how much you like football, sushi, or matzo ball soup. All you can do is decide what your society is to become and then do your best to make it that way. There is no going back in time, so the only possible direction is forward.