Greece falls to globohomo, the 16th European country to do so.
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Friday, February 16, 2024
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
America's amusing smorgasbord of religious, social, and political beliefs according to Real Clear, ranked, annotated
Percent who believe in, believe that, say that, are, et cetera, per Real Clear Opinion Research, here:
Religious freedom is a fundamental human right 93.8 (this idea was foreign to ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, and the era of the Muslim conquests, to name just a few)
Heaven 84.7 (John Lennon most hurt)
Healthcare is a fundamental human right 83.7 (the propaganda of the ObamaCare era worked)Miracles 83.0 (Justin Amash fooled the people 5 times, Peter Meijer only once)
"In God We Trust" 83.0 ("In Fiat Money We Trust" was too long)
Jesus is God or Son of God 80.3 (thanks to not being aborted by the Holy Virgin Mary)Hell 72.4 (San Francisco, New York City, Portland, et cetera)
The Devil 70.3 (yeah baby, drugs, sex, and rock and roll)A woman and her doctor should get to decide whether to have an abortion 63.4 (vaccination highly recommended)
Ghosts 61.4 (unstated whether they are tiny baby ghosts or not)Aliens 56.9 (oddly explains the southern border)
God is male 50.0 (Jesus is shocked, shocked, I tell you)
Witches 45.8 (strongly believed in Michigan methinks)
Prejudice against Jews is a very serious problem in the US 42.6 (because the Jews run everything)
2020 Joe Biden 38.6 (voting by mail multiple times or in person not specified)
Protestant 36.3 (prejudice problem 17.3)
2020 Donald Trump 34.6 (not everything deserves a comment)Democrat Party 33.6
Republican Party 32.8
Never attend religious service 29.2 (makes sense given these results)
Prejudice against Muslims is a very serious problem in the US 29.1 (because of what they did on Oct 7)God is neither male nor female 27.5 (0.9% of respondents also neither male nor female)
2020 didn't vote 24.8 (thank God)
Catholic 22.0 (prejudice problem 14.9)
Independent party 21.4
Attend religious service once a week 19.5 (as good as it gets for category)
No religion 19.4Prejudice against Evangelical Christians is a very serious problem in the US 17.3
Prejudice against Hindus is a very serious problem in the US 16.2 (but, but reincarnation)
Prejudice against atheists is a very serious problem in the US 15.7
Prejudice against Catholics is a very serious problem in the US 14.9
God is female 14.1
Not registered to vote 12.1
Atheist 3.8 (prejudice problem 15.7)
Agnostic 3.7
Other religion 3.3
Islamic 3.2 (prejudice problem 29.1)
Mormon 2.9
2020 voted for other 2.0
Judaism 1.9 (prejudice problem 42.6)Buddhist 1.6
Orthodox 1.3 (Rod Dreher)
Hindu 0.5 (prejudice problem 16.2)
People clearly believe that some groups, to paraphrase Barack Obama in 2012 about the Danes, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Irish, and the Filipinos, seem to get punched far out of proportion with their weight in the culture.
Results discussed here, where this is surely wrong, leaving out the little word "not" in a crucial spot at the end:
Most Americans also remain deeply respectful of the country’s religious roots. A strong majority of respondents – 83% – believe the phrase “In God we trust” should remain on U.S. currency and coins, compared to 17% who back the phrase’s removal.
“Republicans felt more strongly that the phrase should remain compared to Democrats, with 91% believing the phrase should [not] be removed, compared to 78% of Democrats,” Kimball said.
In 2011 former Republican Justin Amash (MI-3) joined eight Democrats to vote against "In God We Trust", which in his first term was a sign of things to come in his last.
Friday, August 30, 2019
Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, opts for Athenian ostracism (and maybe worse): Lincoln and Douglas debates = good, Socrates' debates = bad
The unemployed classics PhD (Princeton) lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children, and runs a much fancier online presence than yours truly. She remains discomfited that America is more Rome than Athens.
As the editor of an online publication that runs articles about the intersections of classical antiquity and the modern world, often from a feminist and progressive perspective, I’ve gotten my fair share of “debate me” challenges. Many of these have come after I began writing about far-right interest in ancient Greece and Rome in 2016. Blocking some of my would-be adversaries on Twitter seemed to just energize them — and convince them I was afraid to engage.
A call to debate may seem intellectual, even civilized. In theory, well-structured and respectful debates are an ideal opportunity to reach an audience that isn’t fixed in its views. In reality, however, most “debate me” types seem to view them mainly as a chance to attack their opponent’s credibility. Their model is not Lincoln and Douglas, but rather Socrates: By needling their interlocutors with rapid-fire questions, they aim to reveal, as they see it, their opponents’ ignorance and stupidity, and their own superior intelligence and logic. ...
These modest men also identify with Socrates, the original “debate me” troll. The Platonic texts show Socrates pulling any number of Athenians into debates, and although some are eager to argue with him, others can hardly wait to escape him by the end of the dialogue. Plato’s “Euthyphro” concludes with Euthyphro insisting that he has to leave, while Socrates calls after him, complaining that they haven’t yet figured out the nature of piety. Many of the dialogues end when the interlocutor has been bludgeoned into submission and seems to find it easier to agree with Socrates than continue further — every “debate me” man’s dream. ...
As Laurie Penny noted last year with respect to Milo Yiannopoulos, deplatforming white supremacists is a much more successful way to shut them down than insisting that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and allowing them to air their hateful views in a structured debate setting.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
On the origin of "The West"
"What is Europe?" is an interesting question.
Old it certainly is, and we conservatives tend to think of Europe as the center of everything as a consequence of a long historical development, especially in the wake of the rise of America as the western outpost of "The West" to become the leader of the free world. But from the beginning, obviously, it was not so, but how?
The Greek mythology put the navel of the world, the center, at Delphi, to which east and west came to consult the famous oracle. From this mythology Europe specifically was first associated with the west conceptually from the simple geographic situation of the oracle's position beneath Parnassus to its west, as first expressed in the "Homeric" Hymn to Pythian Apollo, perhaps dating to as early as the 6th century BC:
"Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said:
'In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.'”
And so we "of the west", of Europe, are so because the Greeks originally said so.
The Romans were the first westerners to acknowledge their debt to Greece, and they demonstrated it in so many ways, but chiefly through imitation of Greece's literature and art, the surest form of flattery. Through conquest of Europe they spread that sense of debt to Greece to all the peoples of the continent, and beyond.
That is why we still feel the pull of Europe, despite all the forces arrayed against us seeking to break its spell over us. But the center is really Greece. If we want to be stronger as the people of The West, we ought to take a cue from those old Romans and commit ourselves anew to imitating the best ourselves, just as the great men of the Renaissance did. And one can do it in English, too, simply by immersing oneself in the authors which formed the basis of Johnson's Dictionary, for example. It's what I do everyday, just to anchor myself to the best of the past in order to make the best a part of my too often sorry, vulgar present.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)