Kmele is on the money regarding the parading of claims to the past when it comes to the victim cache...I always go back to this quote by Thomas Sowell:
"Nothing that Germans can do today will in any way mitigate the staggering evils of what Hitler did in the past. Nor can apologies in America today for slavery in the past have any meaning, much less do any good, for either blacks or whites today. What can it mean for A to apologize for what B did, even among contemporaries, much less across the vast chasm between the living and the dead?
The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future — both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being facts beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with the evils of the past."
75 years ago the Germans made soap out of many of my relatives.
My grandfather was the only one of the 8 in his immediate family that made it out of Radom Poland prior to 1939.
There were 2 million Jews in Poland before WW2 and 10,000 at the end of WW2.
My dad his friends didn't learn to swim because the YMCA didn't allow Jews inside their building.
Nobody in my family ever engaged in a victim narrative. In fact it was quite the opposite. There was gratitude for the opportunity to live & raise a family in a place like Canada. The first boy I lived with was German. My parents adored him because he was a lovely boy, who had a job & that was all that mattered.
I don't know why grievance culture appeals to so many people, but it sure doesn't seem to provide any benefits to the population.
When the Normans invaded, they stole all the land and even now, 956 years later, their descendants still own a large amount of the land in England. Perhaps reparations are in order from the French. While we're at it, lets have some from Italy for the Roman invasion and Denmark for the Viking invasion!
As someone who was born in Britin and grew up in my impressionable teen years in Southern California. and has family in both countries to this day, I feel a certain way about the queen.
What pisses me off the most about the hatred spread online after her death was the complete slagging off of the British Empire....like without it the world was gonna be a much better place. To then castigate any hatred towards a 96 year old woman who spent her life serving her people is mind boggling.
I thought Knele and Michael, educated on history as they are, presented a very fair account of the fallout of her death, whether you loved her or hated her. Don’t ignore history.
One of the reasons I love this podcast.
I also wrote about it the impact of her death on the British people here, in case anyone wants a read.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for countries to not want immigration or immigrants. In America we have a very different culture and background, and even here our immigration system is being abused especially the lack of enforcement of our border, but there is nothing wrong with countries who have had a consistent culture and people for hundreds of over a thousand years to want to keep that culture going, for themselves and their descendants. To reduce that to being "far-right" is just not a fair representation imo. Not every country has to be, or even should be, a multi-cultural society (and even America is supposed to be a melting pot, not multi-cultural, but that is a different discussion...) and not wanting that does not make them worse people than someone who wants to diminish their culture. "Far-right" parties being elected to enact the will of these people sounds like the democratic process at work, which I thought is what we wanted.
My fav invocation of “colonialism” is when Oakland teachers didn’t want to teach phonics anymore (even though it was working amazingly well) because the rigid teaching framework was colonialist. Lolololol.
Not sure how many other Indian premium subscribers are there, but as someone who grew up in India (moved to the US in 2006 at age 24) allow me to pipe in. Most Indians don't dwell on the British Raj at all. They learn about it fairly thoroughly in school, and see the British as the villains against the good guys like Gandhi, but the face of this British Raj isn't the Royal family, it's usually a General here or a Viceroy there who were particularly harsh. Again, the year 1947 is also strongly embedded in everyone's memory, so everyone know all of this was in the distant past and has nothing to do at all with the situation now. Since Britain doesn't have any influence in Indian politics or foreign policy at all these days, there is hardly going to be any reaction at all, and if there is, a neutral one at best to a death in the Royal family. You're probably going to see a bigger response if a recent US President dies than any British head of state.
Also, as a personal opinion, the British colonizing India had its good and bad. There wasn't really a single country or kingdom called India before the British took over. The Mughal empire had already disintegrated into local fiefdoms before the East India Company started accruing land holdings. If the EIC hadn't become the dominant power, and later to be taken over by the British government, what is now Indiaw would have just been a bunch of sectarian countries somewhat akin to Sub-Saharan Africa with some perhaps doing well but the others remaining basket cases. I think it's giggly highly unlikely any of these Indian states would have then undergone something like a Meiji Restoration to become a developed country entirely on its own, or for that matter become western style democracies. Which brings us to the question, for the average common man living in 19th century India, would living under a despotic monarchy be any better than being rules by a western power that was a democracy at home? I would recommend two books, one is Empire by Niall Ferguson and the other is Anarchy by William Dalrymple
Thanks for this, Ranjith. My husband liked the book Decolonization by Jan C. Jansen, have you heard of it? I have a lot of reading to do. It's a topic I've read nothing about! (American Midwesterner).
BYU grad here, which makes me especially unqualified to comment. This twitter thread seems to sum up my thoughts. Its the same one Jesse of TFC Jr tweeted about.
5000 fans, student cheering section 5 to 10 feet away from the court, chanting 'cougars' and the names of some of the players, including Nikki. It is reasonable that someone could mistake that for a slur. Once the godmother jumps, with the best of intentions I am sure, the story becomes more about a nation-wide narrative than the actual incident.
I have a friend named Nick who sometimes goes by “Nicki”. He was introducing himself to someone and provided both names. He was actually admonished about how he pronounces his own name, lest someone think he was saying the magic word.
I think it’s totally plausible that something similar happened in this case.
Kmele asked what variables allow some nations to becomes great while others stultify, atrophy, or collapse. I think this an interesting, and timely, subject that merits some real scrutiny. I think he was right to dismiss externalities such as resources and geography, even less obvious criteria like education and ambition seem inadequate to me. The truth is humanity's most noble moments have been conceived in adversity, if history is any guide possessing both security and sufficiency result in complacency rather than accomplishment as often as not. But let me put it another way.
In material terms, there is nothing which Britain possessed that allowed them to arrive at the industrial revolution which ancient Rome did not -including necessary concepts like pnuematics, foundational physics, theoretical mathematics, leverage, metallurgy, mechanical gears, screws, nails, etc -even the steam engine (the aeolipile, as mentioned by Vitruvius and described both mechanically and principally). Before continuing on, I would like to insist you seriously consider this and the ramification implied by it. There are some arguments here, like the coiled spring, but the Romans had mastered the uncoiled spring and the first steel springs came about during the industrial revolution which undermines the importance somewhat.
It wasn't a question of scale. Entire cities in Portugal were dedicated to the manufacture of goods, sometimes a single good such as garum. The concept of corporate farms began with the Romans, estates with the slaves that lived and worked upon them numbering in the thousands, sometimes several thousands, which were sold at negotiated prices between private individuals at costs which were more than many (if not any) near peer powers were capable of generating themselves as nations. . and these latifundia were not even uncommon. With spears and nets Rome managed to drive more animals into extinction than any other civilization could come close to until nearly a century ago with the advent of hunting by helicopter. A pity for the European lion. They could, and often did, transport rare fish, alive, from as far away as China and breed them simply for the sake of tasting the exotic in glass tanks so large we could swim in them. In Lebanon, at the further edge of the Roman empire outside a place called Baalbek, there is a stone at an abandoned quarry which is the largest ever found and measures 65 feet by 18 feet by 20 feet. It weights 1200 tons. That is two and a half million pounds. No, it certainly wasn't a question of scale.
It wasn't a lack of aptitude or precision. Outside Roman temples they had coin operated animatronics, similar to the mechanical Turk but without a human operator, which would exchange the currency for scented soaps which would be used by any interested to make themselves presentable before entering. Cities, even obscure ones like Vindolanda, boasted anaphoric water clocks which granted every citizen the ability to mark the minute and the hour with as much accuracy as any of us have today -and it would have been immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Big Ben. Bronze fragments from such clocks have been found as far from Rome as Austria and France, They designed their theatres which such excellent acoustics the whispers of actors could be heard in the nosebleeds, and a couple have even survived. Their concrete endures also, their sewers and aqueducts continue in happy operation, their apartment buildings would have been identical to our own up until the 1960s, they had public drinking fountains, internal plumbing for waste and water both, elevators, newspapers, hell, even Galen's knowledge of surgery and physiology wouldn't be much surpassed until the 19th century meaning only in the last couple centuries were we lucky enough to enjoy better health care. They tunneled from opposites ends of a mountain in Greece for nearly a mile and met in the middle -with a deviation at the intersection point which measures in millimeters. No, it was surely not a lack of aptitude or precision.
All of this and yet they never even came close to ushering in the modern world we all enjoy today despite having been all the while but a single small step away.
I am confident in my own answer to this question, and I have given it a great deal of idle thought, but answers are not nearly as interesting as questions. Anyone else want to weigh in on this, which I think is probably the most important question Kmele has raised in some time?
If you Americans aren't sufficiently respectful to the dearly departed Queen, we'll come down from Canada and burn Washington, DC to the ground again.
Wait, what?
Okay, scratch that: if you Americans aren't sufficiently respectful to the dearly departed Queen, we *won't* come down from Canada and burn Washington, DC to the ground again.
According to "sources familiar with the matter" WaPo claimed an orange dude in Florida has the nuclear codes and they may be for sale.
I will get started on procuring the funds to buy materials to burn DC.
I don't know much about this but I figure if I don't burn my house to the ground after instruction from a couple of YouTube video's, I will be good to go :)
This is the pod I needed to counterbalance the the ridiculous anti-queen posturing on Twitter.
Encoyluragingly, the New York Times has covered her death and Charles's accession lavishly. I like to think the Twitter trolls guiltily scroll the fashion articles about young QEII in a darkened room after a hard day of deocolonizing their social.
Protip for decolonizing Twitter. You can filter out tweets!!! Use a chrome extension like Tweet Filter to stop tweets from appearing in your feed. Tweet Filter also supports regex, so you can enter 'coloniz$' and block all tweets containing terms like "decolonize", "colonize" "fuck colonizers" "neocolonialist scum" and other bs words that people just learned and are still figuring out how to use.
There you go: Twitter: Decoloniz$d. 😎 👸🇬🇧 💂♀️
Edit: Still waiting on Tweet Filter to support exceptions so that I can still get tweets if they include certain additional terms. I'm holding out for "Sexy colonialists in your area."
"Show me on the doll where the corgi lady colonized you."
Kmele is on the money regarding the parading of claims to the past when it comes to the victim cache...I always go back to this quote by Thomas Sowell:
"Nothing that Germans can do today will in any way mitigate the staggering evils of what Hitler did in the past. Nor can apologies in America today for slavery in the past have any meaning, much less do any good, for either blacks or whites today. What can it mean for A to apologize for what B did, even among contemporaries, much less across the vast chasm between the living and the dead?
The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future — both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being facts beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with the evils of the past."
75 years ago the Germans made soap out of many of my relatives.
My grandfather was the only one of the 8 in his immediate family that made it out of Radom Poland prior to 1939.
There were 2 million Jews in Poland before WW2 and 10,000 at the end of WW2.
My dad his friends didn't learn to swim because the YMCA didn't allow Jews inside their building.
Nobody in my family ever engaged in a victim narrative. In fact it was quite the opposite. There was gratitude for the opportunity to live & raise a family in a place like Canada. The first boy I lived with was German. My parents adored him because he was a lovely boy, who had a job & that was all that mattered.
I don't know why grievance culture appeals to so many people, but it sure doesn't seem to provide any benefits to the population.
The whole colonialism/imperialism conversation is the cue to get Douglas Murray on the podcast
This was a great episode by itself, but as a tee up for Murray? Man, that be would be inspired.
Absolutely. 👌
When the Normans invaded, they stole all the land and even now, 956 years later, their descendants still own a large amount of the land in England. Perhaps reparations are in order from the French. While we're at it, lets have some from Italy for the Roman invasion and Denmark for the Viking invasion!
Return the greater Israeli - Palestinian lands to the Canaanites! All should pay reparations to the sons of Ham!
As someone who was born in Britin and grew up in my impressionable teen years in Southern California. and has family in both countries to this day, I feel a certain way about the queen.
What pisses me off the most about the hatred spread online after her death was the complete slagging off of the British Empire....like without it the world was gonna be a much better place. To then castigate any hatred towards a 96 year old woman who spent her life serving her people is mind boggling.
I thought Knele and Michael, educated on history as they are, presented a very fair account of the fallout of her death, whether you loved her or hated her. Don’t ignore history.
One of the reasons I love this podcast.
I also wrote about it the impact of her death on the British people here, in case anyone wants a read.
https://nopartyfits.substack.com/p/the-queen-class-and-colonialism
I think it's perfectly reasonable for countries to not want immigration or immigrants. In America we have a very different culture and background, and even here our immigration system is being abused especially the lack of enforcement of our border, but there is nothing wrong with countries who have had a consistent culture and people for hundreds of over a thousand years to want to keep that culture going, for themselves and their descendants. To reduce that to being "far-right" is just not a fair representation imo. Not every country has to be, or even should be, a multi-cultural society (and even America is supposed to be a melting pot, not multi-cultural, but that is a different discussion...) and not wanting that does not make them worse people than someone who wants to diminish their culture. "Far-right" parties being elected to enact the will of these people sounds like the democratic process at work, which I thought is what we wanted.
My fav invocation of “colonialism” is when Oakland teachers didn’t want to teach phonics anymore (even though it was working amazingly well) because the rigid teaching framework was colonialist. Lolololol.
Why is your name “Masters”. Kinda colonialist of you....
Not sure how many other Indian premium subscribers are there, but as someone who grew up in India (moved to the US in 2006 at age 24) allow me to pipe in. Most Indians don't dwell on the British Raj at all. They learn about it fairly thoroughly in school, and see the British as the villains against the good guys like Gandhi, but the face of this British Raj isn't the Royal family, it's usually a General here or a Viceroy there who were particularly harsh. Again, the year 1947 is also strongly embedded in everyone's memory, so everyone know all of this was in the distant past and has nothing to do at all with the situation now. Since Britain doesn't have any influence in Indian politics or foreign policy at all these days, there is hardly going to be any reaction at all, and if there is, a neutral one at best to a death in the Royal family. You're probably going to see a bigger response if a recent US President dies than any British head of state.
Also, as a personal opinion, the British colonizing India had its good and bad. There wasn't really a single country or kingdom called India before the British took over. The Mughal empire had already disintegrated into local fiefdoms before the East India Company started accruing land holdings. If the EIC hadn't become the dominant power, and later to be taken over by the British government, what is now Indiaw would have just been a bunch of sectarian countries somewhat akin to Sub-Saharan Africa with some perhaps doing well but the others remaining basket cases. I think it's giggly highly unlikely any of these Indian states would have then undergone something like a Meiji Restoration to become a developed country entirely on its own, or for that matter become western style democracies. Which brings us to the question, for the average common man living in 19th century India, would living under a despotic monarchy be any better than being rules by a western power that was a democracy at home? I would recommend two books, one is Empire by Niall Ferguson and the other is Anarchy by William Dalrymple
Thanks for this, Ranjith. My husband liked the book Decolonization by Jan C. Jansen, have you heard of it? I have a lot of reading to do. It's a topic I've read nothing about! (American Midwesterner).
No, I haven't read that. Will look it up
I was disappointed that England did not ascend a King of color from the LGBTQ+ community.
BYU grad here, which makes me especially unqualified to comment. This twitter thread seems to sum up my thoughts. Its the same one Jesse of TFC Jr tweeted about.
5000 fans, student cheering section 5 to 10 feet away from the court, chanting 'cougars' and the names of some of the players, including Nikki. It is reasonable that someone could mistake that for a slur. Once the godmother jumps, with the best of intentions I am sure, the story becomes more about a nation-wide narrative than the actual incident.
https://twitter.com/ac_hutchens/status/1565949355147665408
I have a friend named Nick who sometimes goes by “Nicki”. He was introducing himself to someone and provided both names. He was actually admonished about how he pronounces his own name, lest someone think he was saying the magic word.
I think it’s totally plausible that something similar happened in this case.
Kmele asked what variables allow some nations to becomes great while others stultify, atrophy, or collapse. I think this an interesting, and timely, subject that merits some real scrutiny. I think he was right to dismiss externalities such as resources and geography, even less obvious criteria like education and ambition seem inadequate to me. The truth is humanity's most noble moments have been conceived in adversity, if history is any guide possessing both security and sufficiency result in complacency rather than accomplishment as often as not. But let me put it another way.
In material terms, there is nothing which Britain possessed that allowed them to arrive at the industrial revolution which ancient Rome did not -including necessary concepts like pnuematics, foundational physics, theoretical mathematics, leverage, metallurgy, mechanical gears, screws, nails, etc -even the steam engine (the aeolipile, as mentioned by Vitruvius and described both mechanically and principally). Before continuing on, I would like to insist you seriously consider this and the ramification implied by it. There are some arguments here, like the coiled spring, but the Romans had mastered the uncoiled spring and the first steel springs came about during the industrial revolution which undermines the importance somewhat.
It wasn't a question of scale. Entire cities in Portugal were dedicated to the manufacture of goods, sometimes a single good such as garum. The concept of corporate farms began with the Romans, estates with the slaves that lived and worked upon them numbering in the thousands, sometimes several thousands, which were sold at negotiated prices between private individuals at costs which were more than many (if not any) near peer powers were capable of generating themselves as nations. . and these latifundia were not even uncommon. With spears and nets Rome managed to drive more animals into extinction than any other civilization could come close to until nearly a century ago with the advent of hunting by helicopter. A pity for the European lion. They could, and often did, transport rare fish, alive, from as far away as China and breed them simply for the sake of tasting the exotic in glass tanks so large we could swim in them. In Lebanon, at the further edge of the Roman empire outside a place called Baalbek, there is a stone at an abandoned quarry which is the largest ever found and measures 65 feet by 18 feet by 20 feet. It weights 1200 tons. That is two and a half million pounds. No, it certainly wasn't a question of scale.
It wasn't a lack of aptitude or precision. Outside Roman temples they had coin operated animatronics, similar to the mechanical Turk but without a human operator, which would exchange the currency for scented soaps which would be used by any interested to make themselves presentable before entering. Cities, even obscure ones like Vindolanda, boasted anaphoric water clocks which granted every citizen the ability to mark the minute and the hour with as much accuracy as any of us have today -and it would have been immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Big Ben. Bronze fragments from such clocks have been found as far from Rome as Austria and France, They designed their theatres which such excellent acoustics the whispers of actors could be heard in the nosebleeds, and a couple have even survived. Their concrete endures also, their sewers and aqueducts continue in happy operation, their apartment buildings would have been identical to our own up until the 1960s, they had public drinking fountains, internal plumbing for waste and water both, elevators, newspapers, hell, even Galen's knowledge of surgery and physiology wouldn't be much surpassed until the 19th century meaning only in the last couple centuries were we lucky enough to enjoy better health care. They tunneled from opposites ends of a mountain in Greece for nearly a mile and met in the middle -with a deviation at the intersection point which measures in millimeters. No, it was surely not a lack of aptitude or precision.
All of this and yet they never even came close to ushering in the modern world we all enjoy today despite having been all the while but a single small step away.
I am confident in my own answer to this question, and I have given it a great deal of idle thought, but answers are not nearly as interesting as questions. Anyone else want to weigh in on this, which I think is probably the most important question Kmele has raised in some time?
Moynihan buys HP sauce? Just when you thought your opinion of him couldn’t get any higher.
If you Americans aren't sufficiently respectful to the dearly departed Queen, we'll come down from Canada and burn Washington, DC to the ground again.
Wait, what?
Okay, scratch that: if you Americans aren't sufficiently respectful to the dearly departed Queen, we *won't* come down from Canada and burn Washington, DC to the ground again.
Pipe down before we nuke whatever passes for a city up there
Ottawa. For the love of Canada please nuke Ottawa.
Not like Parliament is going to sit for another year, because Covid.
The only indication that Ottawa has been nuked, would be when Trudeau fails to show up at Davos in January.
Godspeed!
We nuke Ottawa and respect the sad passing of Her Majesty, and the canucks burn DC to the ground.
I think we have an accord, good sirs and madams.
Done.
According to "sources familiar with the matter" WaPo claimed an orange dude in Florida has the nuclear codes and they may be for sale.
I will get started on procuring the funds to buy materials to burn DC.
I don't know much about this but I figure if I don't burn my house to the ground after instruction from a couple of YouTube video's, I will be good to go :)
Why is Trump asking for King Charles birth certificate?
This is the pod I needed to counterbalance the the ridiculous anti-queen posturing on Twitter.
Encoyluragingly, the New York Times has covered her death and Charles's accession lavishly. I like to think the Twitter trolls guiltily scroll the fashion articles about young QEII in a darkened room after a hard day of deocolonizing their social.
Protip for decolonizing Twitter. You can filter out tweets!!! Use a chrome extension like Tweet Filter to stop tweets from appearing in your feed. Tweet Filter also supports regex, so you can enter 'coloniz$' and block all tweets containing terms like "decolonize", "colonize" "fuck colonizers" "neocolonialist scum" and other bs words that people just learned and are still figuring out how to use.
There you go: Twitter: Decoloniz$d. 😎 👸🇬🇧 💂♀️
Edit: Still waiting on Tweet Filter to support exceptions so that I can still get tweets if they include certain additional terms. I'm holding out for "Sexy colonialists in your area."
Just type in "Kate Middleton" or "Will"
😆
CNN:
“Democracy is in grave peril.”
Also CNN:
“Up next, 72 more hours of us drooling over the British monarchy.”
Jesus Hirsute Christ, no kidding...
Somehow they are STILL doing it.