The Glorious Revolution

By -
The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 is often viewed as having protected the traditional liberties of Englishmen. The chief two liberties being protected seemed to be those of persecuting Roman Catholics, and persecuting dissenting Protestants.

Comments

  1. Anonymous10:22 PM

    Do you ever reckon that the dominance of the Anglophonic world ensured that it was Protestant England that would determine what is most often read or known in history textbooks for years, thus bringing a tinge of anti-Catholic bias with it?

    I remember that when the Pope visited UK recently, there was some pretty nasty comments thrown around about him in a few columns of mainstream newspapers. Had this been a mullah/imam or the Dalai Lama visiting, nobody would have dared entertain such controversy, but it was totally acceptable for Julie Burchill to write, "If one is Catholic, then surely double speak and lies are second nature." Another called him a "leering old villain in a frock". And nobody blinked.

    It's incredible, this sort of hard bigotry against Catholics in an otherwise not-bigoted region. These are not comments from 1688 but from 2010. So many Catholics live in UK, and yet it's acceptable for writers to label them as double-speaking liars. The Economist's Bagehot column reckoned it was leftovers of anti-Irish sentiment during Irish immigration of 1960s and 1970s. Hmmm, and wasn't it around the same time that Monty Python made the Sperm Is Sacred piece, bashing Catholics?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more