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"dawnbreak in the west" |
Monday, November 02, 2015Pan-European identity - the French can't do itThus spake Bernard. I'm going to agree with the gut-instinct of CounterCurrents. Someone should present Bernard with the state ledgers for Portugal and Greece. A pan-European and French-directed government is already being tried and it has FAILED. French-directed pan-European government has ever been a short-term affair in Europe: Imperator Macsen, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. For non-Frenchmen it boils down to this: few in Europe trust one another, but above all nobody trusts the French. If Americans want an analogue then consider Wilson. I agree more with Bernard's recommendation for a pan-European (and pan-Mediterranean!) sense of solidarity. The Catholic Church was founded to meet exactly this need. Quite often it has even succeeded at it. I admit that today the Church needs better cardinals and - sorry to say - popes. Bernard should latch onto that, and should direct his future efforts into figuring that out. posted by Zimri on 19:18 | link | 0 comments Roman Bernard, Napoleon XIVI was in DC last weekend. There was a nationalist conference there at the time, National Policy Institute - I didn't attend it. The lads at CounterCurrents attended on my behalf, and delivered a report. In it, I see this:
CounterCurrents was put off by Bernard’s dismissal of "white" as an identifying marker. I think that CounterCurrents did not comprehend what nationalisme means in French. Bernard as a Frenchman has a coast on the Mediterranean. Mediterraneans (and Central Asians) don't wholly identify as "white". (Certainly I never have. And I've a sight more reason than have some people.) Bernard was, however, proposing a pan-European entity that would be safe for whites (like Swedes) and for Mediterraneans. People in between would be best-positioned to run a pan-Europe... people like the French. posted by Zimri on 18:25 | link | 0 comments Wednesday, October 28, 2015Enjoy your one term, Cory GardnerI voted for you, Cory Gardner. I had a bad feeling about it all 'round - as you know, if you were reading this blog last year. But I also looked at your opponent. I held my nose - voted accordingly. You proved me right: you were a whore, just waiting for the right john. And you won't get that second chance. posted by Zimri on 17:28 | link | 0 comments Tuesday, October 27, 2015When was Christmas chosen?I've been wondering about Christmas-as-pagan-holiday for some time. Last December, I brought up some primaries: Hippolytus of Rome, d. 235 AD (probably). His commentary on Daniel (in present form) notes 25 December in passing, as if it were obvious to all Christians. Today I've learnt that it wasn't so obvious to Clement of Alexandria, d. 215 AD; that one didn't even mention the 25 December date. Some commenters are saying that although Hippolytus outlived Clement, he wrote down his commentary with its 25 December date in 204 AD. So, before Clement died. Was Clement aware of Hippolytus's work? To what extent was he aware of the Roman school of Christianity? To Christians approaching Christmas, these are vital questions! posted by Zimri on 16:54 | link | 0 comments Sunday, October 25, 2015The economic malaise of the Marwanid stateI've been looking into several post-sura-32 suras lately: suras 23, 63, 70 - maybe sura 9 too (haven't looked too hard at that one). I be noticin' a theme. They're all about paying up. To be sure, these suras each handle the issue differently. Suras 9 and 63 take the nifâq in the cause of God, and run its adherents off the canon. Sura 70 wants a return to sura 51's focus on charity. Sura 23 - well, "@#$% you pay me" wouldn't be too harsh a summary. Also I'm still tilling this field. I expect others will be tilling the same field, and with more skill. Still, it's all looking to me like there was an Islam-wide worry, after the deaths of al-Hajjaj and al-Walid. The Muslims worried about money and how, exactly, to be getting that money from other Muslims. Or at least the qurrâ' were expressing that worry, from whom several proposals to alleviate said worry are preserved in our Qur'an. posted by Zimri on 20:01 | link | 0 comments Break up GoogleGoogle is unethical, and will censor your searches if it opposes what you want. Google can do this because it has taken over a monopoly share on internet search algorithms - as well as owning a blogging platform (blogger) and a video platform (youtube). When I started on Blogger it was run by Pyra; I did not sign up for Google's politically-oriented corruption. It is time for antitrust proceedings to be launched against Google / "Alphabet" / whatever. We on Blogspot need to be liberated. posted by Zimri on 19:42 | link | 0 comments Asking the right questionRegnery, longstanding provisioner of Republican Party prolefeed, has published a book addressing seven axiomata dear to old Southern Democrats - this is Edward H. Bonekemper III, The Myth of the Lost Cause. Here are his components of that "myth": 1. Slavery was a benevolent institution for all involved but was dying by 1861. There was therefore no need to abolish slavery suddenly, especially by war. If all this looks like a listicle from Cracked-dot-com, with a mix of historical data and SJW virtue-signalling, well... that's not far off. I dealt with the book's structure, and specifically #3-7 (mostly #4), in the book thread. #2 I view as bullshit all around - of course the War Of Southern Pride And Yankee Conquest was an amoral power-struggle, like all wars. The point I denied myself there was #1. The purest answer to #1 is, "I don't care". Maybe slavery was benevolent; maybe it was a temporary evil that would die out eventually. I agree that these are incompatible positions (surely a benevolent institution should not die out!). But either way, those men not affected by the Peculiar Institution should not care about a "need to abolish". The South was their land and their problem. As long as they're not raiding the coast of Maine plucking off villagers like the Barbary Pirates, then let the Southern States deal with it. I would personally hold to the "relatively benevolent" side, based on man's natural need for hierarchy... which is Jim's side. I would reopen Nehemiah Adams' Southside View of Slavery and ask if that was really so much worse than, say, contemporary Haiti. Or than Baltimore today... but, again, I don't care. Only once you get to that point of saying "I don't care", only then you can evaluate an historical case. Bonekemper doesn't care about Robert E. Lee or James Longstreet, and does well weighing up their respective cases. Where Bonekemper does care about an issue, like making the Democratic Party look bad; that's where he falls down as an historian. But then, those who publish through Regnery have rarely been interested in history for its own sake. posted by Zimri on 19:15 | link | 0 comments Friday, October 23, 2015Upload #119 - assigned tasks"The Musallun" had assigned sura 70 to its sequential place in the Qur'an, between suras 32 and 23. But I hadn't dated sura 23 yet (still haven't). This left sura 70 equally unbounded. It is time, then, to find any dateable material parallel to sura 70. Over the last couple days I think I've found one: a hadith. I have now done a project to nail down that hadith and, thereby, sura 70: "Determined Allotments". For the narrow purpose of dating that sura, "The Musallun" is now redundant; but that project still serves to constrain the suras before it. I have updated also "The Ararat Tax". As a side-note, I finished reading the Tannous thesis pdf (all 652 pages!). I have added some material to "Hanaput of Syria", mostly from a Jacob of Edessa text but for Tannous I wouldn't otherwise have. UPDATE 10/24: "Basmala". Since we're on the topic of ma'rij. posted by Zimri on 19:04 | link | 0 comments Saturday, October 17, 2015Upload #118 - those who pray, don't askWhen I'd first heard of Tannous's thesis, I knew it would have an effect on "Ararat Tax". Now I've read most of it, it hasn't altered my argument; but it has led me to several places there that were... messy. I also found where sura 23 was paralleling sura 70. This DID alter that project's argument. Before now I hadn't looked into sura 70 very hard. I've generally avoided the smaller suras. Lack of content lowers not only my ability to find any parallels, but also to find any useful content at all. As for larger suras' parallels to so small a sura, I tend to leave it to a footnote. Sura 70 has proven more interesting than that. First, sura 23's use of vv. 29-35 amounts to an early tafsir on that passage, and perhaps a witness to how early Muslims ("Musalls", technically) were using the whole thing. Also sura 70 itself was adapting sura 32(!), decidedly placing sura 70 to the Marwani era. Moving on to a more selfish reason: sura 70 falls after the scope of Throne of Glass, so I don't have to update So a project on this is win-win all 'round. Here it is then - "The Musallûn". UPDATE 10/22: The Throne take on sura 37 employed an idiom ("lord of easts") that sura 70 also used ("lord of easts and wests"). Unfortunately my reference was sloppy and could be taken as an implication that sura 37 used sura 70. I am now claiming that this is impossible. This means that a future edition will have to explain that, as a shared trope. @#$%. posted by Zimri on 20:12 | link | 0 comments Friday, October 16, 2015Toward a first edition of Tannous's bookIf Jack BV Tannous is planning on making a true book of his epic thesis, I can suggest some corrections in the interim. I mean, besides typoes like "Baghad", and besides updating the references with the last five years of work. Obviously. In terms of fact, at least a mention of Trajan the Patrician would be fair if we're discussing the contemporary Greeks, especially given that the book does give us Constantine IV's oecumenical council as an example of Greek scholarship; to omit Trajan smacks of ignorance or, worse, of rhetoric. Also: John of Phenek (p. 273) is technically bar Penkaya, son of the man of Phenek; and also I believe he has been more narrowly dated to 686 AD, since Brock's work in 1987 (at least see Hoyland, 200). On that topic, the book dates Kindi's apology to the early 800s based on a 1985 paper; much has been done since then on that topic, too - PS van Koningsveld (2004) suggests the late 800s. Stylistically: lose the cliches, metaphors, and strained jokes in the text and especially in the chapter-names (yes, we've read "canon fodder" before - many, many times). I also felt like the author was repeating himself. That quote posted by Zimri on 17:41 | link | 0 comments Thursday, October 15, 2015Wild ass burns down shrineAll versions of the Bible, with sura 12, agree: Jacob-named-Israel spawned many sons and at least one daughter (Dinah). One of those sons was Joseph; there were also Benjamin and Judah. The brothers grabbed Joseph and tossed him into a well. Some Midianites, or Ishmaelites - I forget which - pulled him out and brought him to then-Hykso / -Canaanite Lower-Egypt. Joseph got himself into a position of authority and then played head-games with his treacherous brothers, and their father; until all was worked out in the end. Later Joseph spawned Manasseh and Ephraim, patriarchs of the North. Judah and Benjamin are the fathers of the Jews of the south. This meant that Joseph was the Jews' uncle but not their patriarch. The Samaritans have latched onto that, and so have the Christians and Muslims. They all shared a need for a patriarchal lineage to Abraham that wasn't Jewish (nor Benjaminite, nor Levite nor what have you). But the b'nai Jehuda respect Joseph anyway. Yes Judah helped betray Joseph; but Joseph got his own back, accounts were settled and - later - Judah accepted the refugees of fallen northern Israel. This is all moot now. Joseph's tomb in Shechem is up in flames. The sons of Ishmael back then saved Joseph's life. Today, their descendents don't care about the sons of Israel, about any of them. They don't even care about the rhetorical use that could be made of Joseph's memory. They just want to watch the world burn. My condolences go to the Samaritans tonight; equally to all the other peoples of the Book, and to anyone with any care for history and tradition. posted by Zimri on 21:48 | link | 0 comments The canon of Muslim-hatersSome commenters have said that Islam and its adherents have provided nothing useful to the store of world knowledge, or at least not enough useful to reckon against the damage they have done. I'll not argue that point here. Here instead I will offer a canon of texts to which those commenters resort for evidence:
The commenters further name-dropped:
But I have not read this far, myself. I know even Gibbon only from excerpts. So I won't hazard to what degree they agree with the extremists. As far as my thoughts on those books I have read: I rated Scott and Nor'burg 2/5 apiece, Inârah so far 3/5. Spencer (here) would be 3/5 (his book on ISIS and his Muhammad biography were 4/5 IMO). I got the feeling that Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind was too milquetoast for this lot; but I also got the feeling that some of the aforementioned commenters had read this one too. I expect that Wright's read it. But Wright's not always honest. So if Wright has read it, he skipped over what it had to say about the Mu'tazila - deliberately. As a general rule, I prefer knowing to not knowing; the texts noted here wobble uncertainly on that fence. If most of these commenters are confronted with a Muslim who knows what he's talking about, I expect they will be defeated. posted by Zimri on 19:48 | link | 0 comments John C. Wright is not being honestYou have no doubt heard that there was a Golden Age of Islam, where Muslim scholars preserved the works of Aristotle and the ancients, invented the zero, or made great strides in astronomy and mathematics. This is all an outrageous lie, the precise opposite of the truth. There were certain Spanish scholars, mostly Jews and Christians, conquered by Muslims, but who preserved the ancient texts despite the Muslim program of destroying them. The Byzantine Empire preserved what we have of ancient learning, and scholars fleeing the downfall of one Byzantine theme, province, or city after another in the relentless onslaught of Mohammed reintroduced them into the West. The Moslems not only were not the preservers of the knowledge of the ancient literature, they were the main force destroying it. The only way to interpret this paragraph is that the Jews and Christians preserved those texts under cover of darkness, and that they did so the whole time. This is untrue. We learn from Tannous that very highly-placed Muslims sponsored the Christians in translating philosophical and medical texts. How highly? As in, Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Malik the Wazīr of the caliphs - he sponsored Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (p. 50). Yes, Christians were on their own in copying explicitly Christian texts - including histories. But I think we may allow the Muslims that lapse, given how Christians tended to copy explicitly Muslim texts, to refute them. I'm sure Wright hadn't read Tannous. Fine; I hadn't either, before last night. But I know Wright'd read about al-Biruni and al-Khwarizmi, and of several other Muslims (however nominal and Mutazilite) who had built on the Syriac / Arabic translation efforts under the 'Abbasids. He might even have read about Firabi's own (admittedly wrongheaded) account about how he had found out about Aristotle (Tannous, p. 341). I know this of Wright because he refers to the overall summary - and because he mentions Islamic thinkers later on, like Firabi's ultimate heir Avicenna. Wright does so just to dismiss it all as a trope which he can deny. Or DISQUALIFY, if you like. That means that John C. Wright is hiding the truth. "Rhetoric", as some call it. I call it anti-Muslim muda'rat; deceit in the service of a religious agenda. MORE: Vox Day quoted this post and, in the comments, defended it: There is, in "dialectic", this little thing called the onus probandi, "Burden Of Proof". I find no exception for the case of electronic communications; and in any case, a "blog post" of 1886 words (according to Microsoft Word's count) has the length of a week's work for an undergraduate's history-essay. It is not "damn lazy" of a critic to demand that proof; it is damn lazy - at best - of the original blogger to omit that. Wright then showed up in the comments, peeved that someone had the temerity to doubt his word, and provided some evidence. Which undercut his all-or-nothing statements made earlier. Which - more so - implied an admission that his white-knight Vox Day was in the wrong to dismiss onus probandi in his special case. So much LOL. posted by Zimri on 19:02 | link | 0 comments Late Antiquity for PirennistesAs best I can tell, "late antiquity" implies a period after the best Latin and Greek literature, and before the era of knights and castles. I also recognise a Dark Age with minimal literacy, mass ignorance and helplessness before barbarians - the last of which problems, those knights and castles solved. So, I ask - what's the difference? Back in 2006 I had a simple answer to that: there wasn't one, look at what a hellhole seventh-century France became, and for evidence read Ward-Perkins. I've read some more in the past nine years, not least Tannous's thesis. So, I'll try again here. I admit some biases. I am generically "British" with a quarter Ashkenazi. Great Britain went from Rome straight to the Dark Age, and thence to the Anglo-Saxons. As for those Saxons, and for the Irish for that matter: they started out in the Dark Age. Ashkenazim meanwhile appear to have flitted about marginal states like Khazaria and Kiev which, again, did not partake of Classical Antiquity. This may explain why it has been so difficult, personally, to get my head around a "late antiquity". Britain didn't have a "late antiquity". Saxony, Ireland, and Khazaria didn't even have an "antiquity". I am learning that the Syriac-speaking nations, at least, very much did have a period after Rome and before Caliph al-Mutawakkil. It was a long period, and a productive one; and a period in continuity with classical-era Syria (Edessa, mainly). Even in 2006 I'd known from Ward-Perkins that Syria didn't suffer during the seventh century. So now I have to consider that "late antiquity" can apply to post-Roman nations, at least to Syria. This makes me wonder where we can apply this to non-Syrians. I'd suggest applying it to early Merovingian France, first. Gregory of Tours seems the gold standard here. As for post-Roman Spain, they had the Visigothic Code. So Late Antiquity in western Europe would mean at latest: sixth century for France, seventh for hinterland Spain, and for Rome the Byzantine Papacy. Before that, we can negotiate. After that, in each nation: the Dark Age. posted by Zimri on 18:19 | link | 0 comments The Syrians, the people in betweenLast night I was alerted to Guillaume Dye. This directed me further to Jack BV Tannous's 2010 thesis, Syria between Byzantium and Islam (PDF). Dye believes that Tannous's thesis is brilliant. I have read two hundred pages of this so far. Tannous argues for Syriac as the literary language of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries AD. When the Arabs erased the classical-era equivalent of Sykes-Picot, the Syrians were able to travel between Cairo and Basra. Tannous lists many dozens of examples wherein Syrians translated Greek texts into their own language and, later, into Arabic: not just religious but medical, philosophic, and scientific. Arabic before all that was for poetry and for military command. (The Qur'an, of course, is both.) It was in medicine that the Syrians were most important: Syrians were also pioneers in textual-criticism. They needed that for a brain-breaking array of Near Eastern transmissions and translations of the Bible - including, now, several Aramaic versions. Tannous implies that the Syrians took what they learnt in the Biblical field, and applied that to the medical texts - because a mistake in a medical textbook could be literally fatal, in every correct sense of both words. Tannous further notes that the historiographical tradition also was much better in Syriac than it was in Greek, Armenian, or Coptic. In fact Tannous rejects even the term "Dark Age" for Syria in this time. I agree with Dye: this thesis is brilliant. I do hope that it becomes a book some day, that I can purchase. UPDATE 10/16: I'm up to 400 pages now. I've updated this post; and if you were looking for my helpful-hint section for the author, that's now here. posted by Zimri on 17:56 | link | 0 comments Wednesday, October 14, 2015Fallen starGeoffrey Marcy, discoverer of planets (his team confirmed "Bellerophon" around 51 Pegasi, and discovered another planet around 70 Virginis - many many others), has come under a campaign to get him fired for sexual harassment. He apologised, which - as you know, if you've been reading Vox Day - meant the attacks on him doubled. Forget it, Geoff; it's Berkeleyland. Some teachers can handle this generation of Social Justice fanatics. Others, like Marcy, cannot. Such teachers should work and teach at male-only (or female-only) establishments. If they don't exist yet, such should be founded. posted by Zimri on 17:46 | link | 0 comments Tuesday, October 06, 2015Lawyers are bad for the environmentThey're saying that Volkswagen's gaming of the system will cost more than the British Petroleum oil-spill in the Gulf. Volkswagen let off a few more chemicals than they should have; but those chemicals have been linked to - very little environmental damage, over what a rival vehicle might have let off. BP's oil-spill on the other hand was a horrific disaster. If Volkswagen's corner-cutting results in more economic Fail than BP's did: that is the result of bad law, not of bad environmental practice. It strikes me that our real pollutant here is American law. I suggest mulching lawyers. posted by Zimri on 19:29 | link | 0 comments |
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