Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).
For most of its existence, the Smithsonian, a sprawling system of museums and research centers established by Congress in 1846, has enjoyed a staid reputation as the “nation’s attic.” It’s traditionally been led by scientists. But in 2019 its Board of Regents tapped Bunch, a nineteenth-century historian with a flair for diplomacy, to leave his beloved N.M.A.A.H.C. [National Museum of African American History and Culture]... and shepherd the entire organization through our polarized “post-truth” era....
Did you know we were in the “post-truth” era? The term is never explained in the article.
I went rooting around in the New Yorker archive to see how if I was supposed to already get "'post-truth' era." On the topic of museums, I found "A Natural-History Museum for a Post-Truth Age" (from April 2023). There's some some talk about the “denial of science.”
I don't think it's that the museums are leaving truth to the past. It's more that the writer of the article think the people have abandoned truth and the museums need to provide correction.
I found this 2019 article: "The 'Post-Truth' Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News."
Pressed to articulate the identity of his publication, Lin used the phrase “post-truth,” which he attributed to the New York Times, to express his belief that the true essence of things is fundamentally unknowable and that the meaning of the news of the day depends on the spin one chooses to put on it.
This is a different meaning for the term "post-truth," the philosophical one. Here, the people who leave truth behind are sophisticated, not deplorable.
And what's this, from 2018? "Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age/The icon’s legacy is no longer secure, but he anticipated much about our current political moment."
Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote....
Also in 2018, I'm seeing "Donald Trump, Jamal Khashoggi, and the Post-Truth World."
In his book “On Tyranny,” from February, 2017, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder sounded the alarm, warning that “Post-truth is pre-fascism” and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”...
This is completely discordant with Gandhi's idea... ... ... isn't it?
ADDED: Since the article about the Chinese publication cited the New York Times, I went to the NYT archive and found its oldest use of "post-truth," and what a delightful surprise: It's Gary Hart!
Gary Hart, quoting Eric Alterman. From October 2014: "'When Presidents Lie': The Post-Truth Presidency/Gary Hart reviews book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences by Eric Alterman."
Ultimately, Alterman intends to prove, one Big Lie leads to the next and then, ultimately and inevitably, results in a "post-truth presidency" (under -- guess who)....
Somewhere between Vietnam and Ronald Reagan's systematic deceptions concerning weapons sales to the terrorist state of Iran, Alterman argues, we began the slide into the age of "the post-truth presidency," in which truthful Jimmy Carter is marginalized while dishonest Ronald Reagan is revered. And, after Clinton, George W. Bush has "returned the presidency to the tradition of presidential deception" regarding matters of war and peace. A presidential aide can dismiss a series of major Bush deceptions regarding the reasons for war in Iraq on the grounds that the president "is not a fact-checker," and New York Times columnists and Washington Post editorialists acknowledge the deceptions but justify the war nonetheless. This Alterman takes as evidence of official acceptance of the "post-truth" era....
I'm seeing "post-truth" as a manifestation — probably fake! — of a belief that there was a time in the past when lying was not quite so pervasive and there was at least some shame or even consequence.
AND: Searching my own archive, I see that I traced down the term "post-truth" in January 2023 — "post-truth," though not "post-truth era." It turns out that "post-truth" was coined by the director of "Breaking Away," Steve Tesich."We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams."
"All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world...."Wrote Steve Tesich in "A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992.
The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves. The dismantling of our Republic goes on, and if the spiritual and intellectual vigor of our children is the true indication of our future, then our future is even more troubling than our present....We keep asking why the level of our children's intelligence and competence, as measured by all our tests, keeps dropping. The reason is very simple: We don't want them to be well educated. The last thing we want now is for an intellectually and spiritually vigorous generation to confront us with the question of what we have done to this country....
We have lost both faith and contact with our national myth.... When lost, the most dangerous thing one can do is to blunder blindly ahead. The comparison may be too extreme, but when Europe was lost in the Dark Ages it went back to its heritage for enlightenment and proceeded into the Renaissance. We have that option as well, and with it the hope and promise of our own renewal....
Tesich — who won an Oscar for writing the 1979 movie "Breaking Away" — was credited with coining the term "post-truth."
Here's a Nation article about the coinage — "Post-Truth and Its Consequences: What a 25-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About the Current Moment." That's from November 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries made "post-truth" the "Word of the Year."
You still have something of a grasp on truth if you can use the term "post-truth." You're probably observing that other people are living in the realm beyond truth, but you're still in touch with the truth, you must be thinking, perhaps dishonestly.
Obviously, November 2016 was the time for finally getting around to making "post-truth" the "Word of the Year." We know what happened in November 2016.
Tesich had died by then. He had a heart attack in 1996....
पोस्ट्स
६० टिप्पण्या:
"Segregation Now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" - George Wallace. The Democrats never change.
Philosophical post-truth just says that if you're looking for truth, you're probably looking in the wrong place. It starts with Nietzsche
Supposing truth to be a woman - what? is the suspicion not well-founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women, that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?
Certainly she has not let herself be won -- and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged, if it continues to stand at all!
The reason why the Museum of American History "can't tell everybody’s story?" is because some American demographics suck oxygen out of the room in inverse proportion to their occupancy level.
Abandon truth. Women and children first.
The new museums will have bonfires burning out front, fueled by the disposal of the old white guy artifacts…you know, the founders…
which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world
What does that even mean? Biggest blend of races (and if so, who is keeping track of that - creepy)? Most different nationalities?
One thing it does not mean is that it became one of the most visited museums in the world. If that were true, they would have said so.
Critical theory deconstructs truth, like justice, by positing it as mere power. Exhilarating if your group is the one seizing and holding power, deplorable if the Other Guys are. The revolting Elite probably takes especial delight in the fact that appeals to objective truth or justice are effective at restraining most conservatives from being as ruthless as the Progressives are.
Post Truth is like the clown nose. You wear it or not wear it from time to time.
How reconstruction or the black renaissance slave ships is the only thing that comes to mind of course his pla minders want to think exactly that
If you didn't know we were in a "post-truth" world, you haven't been listening to Biden pushing his reasons he should be re-elected.
Derrida does post truth by deconstructing systems he likes, the opposite of academic deconstruction which itself is after power. Derrida is after amusement. "This system doesn't work the way it looks like it works."
He was appointed first by w exhibit 26 of his terrible judgement
"The new museums will have bonfires burning out front, fueled by the disposal of the old whie guy artifacts…you know, the founders"
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a talentless obese black 'artist' taken from central casting wearing a spandex body suit playing James Madison flute, forever."
- George OhWell, 2084
I haven't been, does anyone know whether the National Museum of African American History and Culture under his leadership made any note of the incredible sacrifices white Americans made to overturn slavery?
Here, the people who leave truth behind are sophisticated, not deplorable.
Correct, and this is the most widely held one. It is not traditionalists who have abandoned the idea that there is objective Truth, objective Beauty and objective Facts, it is the sophisticated post-modernists who deny such things are knowable or exist at all.
Just do a quick mental exercise. Are the people who say "your truth" and "my truth" the same people who also say "our democracy"? In my experience they are. In the late 1960s about 90% of Americans still claimed to be Christians, and the generally held belief was there was indeed a Truth that could be sought. Journalists were taught to rely on Facts in their stories. Architecture, Art and Music were said to express Beauty.
All that is dead or dying in post-truth world because that is what the progressives and marxists want: no anchor to which Americans can point and all agree upon. I'm sorry to say but the Feminist movement itself was captured by the same post-truth marxists to the extent that they cannot even now answer the simple question, "What is a woman?" This all a piece with the clash between civilization and barbarianism, represented in this years election by the Barbarian Biden who embraces post-truthism and the founder of Truth Social and defender of civilization, Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcRS5eUpwk&ab_channel=JonDoe
what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model.
Really? So can we anticipate a White Person's History Museum, a Chinese Museum, a Latino Museum, etc.? And then what do we do with all that artificially fragmented information? How do we tie it together into an American History Museum?
Or do we? Do we just leave everybody knowing a lot about their little niche and little about anything else? Shall we use the Smithsonian to further Balkanize the country?
Professor Steve Hayward had an excellent post on the Power Line blog showing how the Dems have called the GOP fascists all the way back to Harry S. Truman.
The Dems have no ideas other than fear and name calling.
Just what America needs: Slave ships on display.
Half my family is from a red dirt farm in Mississippi. I'm old enough to have seen colored water fountains and been exposed to the racism there. But frankly, during the depression, my mom did not know color. Everyone was poor.
People don't understand that both reconstruction & civil rights were opposed because our "betters" from up north were telling us what we had to do. there was a natural backlash to that, but forced integration made us have to deal with it and we became better for it.
I dare say that race relations were far better than any place I visited in the country for work. Hell, 20 years after we were forced to integrate schools with busing, they burned the fucking buses when they were finally forced to integrate in Boston.
Everything was proceeding well until Chicago Jesus & Big Mike decided to use race to divide & conquer the US.
Fuck them and the marxist billionaires funding the division.
Rant over
"most diversely visited museums in the world"
What is this clunky phrase supposed to mean? I guess you're supposed to "decode it" and understand that it means lots of black people visit the museum. But you shouldn't have to guess.
Anyway, at least slave ships have something to do with USA history. Which is more than you can say about the Holocaust Museum in DC. The USA had nothing to do with the Holcaust - except end it.
Elections are becoming un-auditable. Soon history and reality itself will be that way too.
There won't be a paper trail, just an endlessly changing Wikipedia written and edited by AI. You won't be able to go back and look up what happened. In fact, it will be better not to look because who knows what you will find?
"Shall we use the Smithsonian to further Balkanize the country?"
We won't use the Smithsonian to further Balkanize the country, but they will.
Morgan Freeman / Mike Wallace
https://youtu.be/Mh8mUia75k8
Enough said
So white supremacy but erase or marginalize 70% of the population
It was Nietzsche who pointed out that the Christian belief in the supremacy of Truth is what subverted Christianity. The Christians held that God could not posit a false set of facts or act contrary to reason. They thought that Truth and Reason were attributes of the Supreme Being, and that Truth and Reason would supplement rather than subvert faith...There was a time when everyone on earth believed in God. There were some people who didn't believe in Divine Providence, but they all, nonetheless, knew that there had to be a creator who had an intelligent design....There are still people who believe in God, but post Galileo, post NASA no one believes that Heaven is up there or that Hell is down there. Reason and truth leads us to believe that we're not at the center of the universe nor are we the crown of creation.....Fair minded people know that the center of the cosmos is located some 10 subscript 517 power light years north or alpha centauri and that the fungus is the most durable and resilient life form on earth.
"Elections are becoming un-auditable. Soon history and reality itself will be that way too.
There won't be a paper trail, just an endlessly changing Wikipedia written and edited by AI. You won't be able to go back and look up what happened. In fact, it will be better not to look because who knows what you will find?"
This is very adjacent to Dead Internet Theory. A ray of hope is that thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of perpetually online amateurs have begun saving sites, wikipedia pages, tweets, and other cogent documents in an effort to archive that material for a dystopian future.
Yes, they would like to delete it all "and start over" again. Luckily storage capacity is still relatively cheap...for now.
I’m certain the museum with the slave ships will have a special exhibit room dedicated to the folks in Africa that rounded up and sold off their tribal and rival brothers to the slave ports. After all, enslaving and merchandizing 12 million plus folks is certainly a historical achievement! Even more when you consider they blew through the gains with nothing long term to show for it.
Thats just it the ashanti the dahomey mansa musa and the songhai empire are left out of the picture
Another appearance from that left-liberal standby, the Unilateral Culture War.
"I’m certain the museum with the slave ships will have a special exhibit room dedicated to the folks in Africa that rounded up and sold off their tribal and rival brothers to the slave ports. After all, enslaving and merchandizing 12 million plus folks is certainly a historical achievement! Even more when you consider they blew through the gains with nothing long term to show for it."
None of that ever happened. The Space-Africans lived in utopian bliss in Wakanda after landing roundabouts Lubumbashi to work on the next generation of fusion reactors for the planned colonization of Venus. This was before troglodyte Europeans outnumbered and overwhelmed them with their primitive thunder-weapons. They wuz kangs, and kangs again they shall be...well at least that's what the little museum placard will say, won't it?
Did you know we were in the “post-truth” era?
“Joe Biden has never been sharper.” Yeah, Althouse, I think I worked it out a while ago.
I give you commentator Inga as the exemplar of “post truth.” She believes what she has been told to believe and things like facts and logic aren’t of any interest to her at all. Unfortunately for Democrats and history professors at lefty universities and people who write for the New York Times there is a real world, there are real facts, and there are real consequences for believing untruths, and normal people get that.
'Post-Truth' are the words you use on people whose opinions you don't like, as you helpfully apply your corrective wisdom.
Back when people believed in God and Satan, we were reliably informed that it was the Devil with a huge assist from Eve who led Adam astray and women were thus mostly responsible for our fallen nature. Through the grace of God and His sacraments we could be saved, but keep a weather eye out for women.... We are now reliably informed that most people are inherently good. It has been determined that all the troubles of the world are due to straight white men and their pursuit of power and profit. So that whole bit about Eve was wrong. It's straight white men who have screwed up the world and the whole point of studying history and visiting museums is to learn further lessons about how bad straight, white men are.
I really think that what we did with the African American museum...is the right model.
His museum once posted a list of "Whiteness" traits, including "objectivity" and "punctuality." This was too much even for The New Enlightened, and it was taken down.
Ironclad said...
"I’m certain the museum with the slave ships will have a special exhibit room dedicated to the folks in Africa that rounded up and sold off their tribal and rival brothers to the slave ports. After all, enslaving and merchandizing 12 million plus folks is certainly a historical achievement! Even more when you consider they blew through the gains with nothing long term to show for it."
Funny you should bring that up. You know those wildly colorful clothes that a lot of African women wear? The idea for that cloth originated in France. Bolts of colorful cloth were used as trade items for slaves,(anything, but gold or silver). But it was expensive with the hand looms of the time. The idea for a programmable loom started with some other French guy than Jacquard. But Jecquard was standing there when the demand for that colorful cloth took off. So he gets the credit. If you want to stretch the idea to its breaking point you might say that the slave trade was responsible for computers.
I bet that's not going to be in the museum.
Ironclad. Nice work.
When there is a duty to speak, the omission of a material fact is fraud. State ex rel NSBA v. Douglas, 227 Neb. 1 (1987).
Light loves the truth. Nice people prefer truth be hidden away by practitioners using k sweet loving lies. But maybe that fear of truth is better than risking wars replacing the peace. The aphorism becomes “never talk about religion or politics .“ because it triggers strife.
But wait…fighting for a truth is what we called the Good Wars. Like fighting the British Empire and fighting the Slave States and fighting the Nazis and fighting the Empire.of Japan and fighting the USSR.
And as Jordan Peterson likes to remind us, the essence of the totalitarian Communism Enemy is making people recite what they know are lies and like it.
And then there is always that Judeo Christian scripture revealing that to be free we must seek the truth from the Father, Son and Spirit of Truth.
Oh well, it’s the grandchildren’s problem now. Maybe Taylor Swift can be their Bob Dylan.
"Did you know we were in the “post-truth” era?"
Yes. It's the era in which progs no longer control the entire narrative 24/7 and the right occasionally fights back against prog absurdities.
"In his book “On Tyranny,” from February, 2017, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder sounded the alarm, warning that “Post-truth is pre-fascism” and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”"
A warning that he then repeated over and over when the Steele dossier was used against Trump and the 51 falsely derided the laptop. He did, didn't he?
"after Clinton, George W. Bush has "returned the presidency to the tradition of presidential deception" regarding matters of war and peace."
LOL. Yeah, Billy Jeff, he was the model of truth and honesty, in all matters. When they say these things, do progs mean to be funny, like, tongue in cheek?
He might not recall or appreciate the association, but I had some contact with Lonnie Bunch in our overlapping spheres and he was always a scholar and a gentleman.
Since I haven't been to or studied the museum--all I know is what I read here--I don't have anything to say about that.
As for Dead Internet, once that happens it will be back to paper for the minority that survive the chaos. Our electronic-ephemeral civilization may well leave nothing for future generations to discover and recover, and given that so much of what is produced is shit . . .
"Bolts of colorful cloth were used as trade items for slaves"
Also specific designs of Venetian glass beads. Some were traded for gold, some for slaves.
We have reached a point of such wealth and technical sophistication that any moron can instantly get the attention of millions of other morons with a few deft clicks on a smartphone.
I think Nietzsche also pointed out that Barbarism was a combination of technical skill and cultural backwardness . . . if that doesn't describe the present I don't know what does.
The modern Atlantic economy was built on the trade in and exchange of drugs, guns, and slaves.
Is 'Post truth' like 'My truth'?
Because my truth is that I am more handsome than Brad Pitt and have a bigger cock than John Holmes.
YMMV...
Those dang Portuguese: first to West Africa, first to slaving across the Atlantic.
PM
They held onto it for a long time. Next came the Dutch. Then the English and French around the same time. We. N. Americans were late in the game and often didn't get slaves straight from Africa but from the Carribean or Cuba or Brazil.
And, after Clinton, George W. Bush has "returned the presidency to the tradition of presidential deception" regarding matters of war and peace.
Takes some brass-balled bias to elevate Bill Clinton, the poster boy for slippery, weaselly, deceitful politicians, above the earnest Bush the younger on matters of truthfulness.
I know why they do this, they want us to think W deliberately lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. However, I favor the theory that he was himself lied to, and was merely a pawn of the military-industrial-espionage complex that works tirelessly to keep this country at perpetual war, may God damn them all to hell and bring back Trump to destroy them.
The modern Atlantic economy was built on the trade in and exchange of drugs, guns, and slaves.
The "triangle trade" was quite remarkably lucrative. Distill rum in Newport; take it to west Africa and give it to the local kings and chiefs in exchange for their criminals, prisoners of war, and traitors; take the slaves to the Caribbean sugar plantations and trade them for molasses; take the molasses back to Newport and use it to make more rum.
One well-known branch of my grandfather's family made a large fortune this way and used it to endow a major university. I come from the poor abolitionist preacher branch of the family, and never benefitted from a penny of that blood money.
It's both infuriating and comical to note that descendants of the slave-trading African tribes can immigrate to this country and take full advantage of race-based preferences meant to compensate the descendants of those they enslaved and sold to the white man.
And as Jordan Peterson likes to remind us, the essence of the totalitarian Communism Enemy is making people recite what they know are lies and like it.
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to." -- Theodore Dalrymple
The idea that the "Atlantic Economy" was built on slaves is an overstatement. What "economy"? The USA economy? The UK one?
All the slaves did was help produce sugar in the Carbbiean (sic) and later in the 19th century large amounts of USA cotton. New England and the Middle States was built by Englishmen and others coming over and building towns, clearing the land and farming. And the same is true of the upper South. As for the Cotton South, you might was well credit the Cotton gin - because without that no million bales of cotton.
People never seem to grasp that before large numbers of railroads and steamships in the late 19th century, foreign trade was a small part of everyone's economy. Most wealth was made by farmers, miners, etc. Not importing sugar and cotton.
RCOCEAN II said...
"The idea that the "Atlantic Economy" was built on slaves is an overstatement."
Yup. On the eve of the Civil War, one of the arguments of the slavery apologists was that the American economy was built on slavery and would collapse without it. It didn't.
"As for the Cotton South, you might was well credit the Cotton gin - because without that no million bales of cotton."
Eli Whitney disliked slavery, and part of his motivation in creating the cotton gin would be to reduce the need for slave labor. It had the opposite effect, rejuvenating the institution.
The economy of the south, maybe. The north was bust industrializing and trading all over the world.
Since I said that the Atlantic economy was built on the trade in drugs, guns, and slaves, it's simply bad faith and poor manners to strip the statement down to a one-factor strawman. (But that's RCOCEANII's stock-in-trade: deliberate obtuseness in an effort to garner attention.)
The Atlantic economy. That's what I said and what I meant; it's not that difficult a concept. It includes the European naval powers and their colonies as well as the early American republic and the exchanges between and among them.
Tobacco and rice, not just cotton and sugar. The point isn't that it was more important than domestic production of staples, but that it was the most lucrative form of trade--long-distance luxuries, and was important enough to cause wars.
The first major overseas military effort made by the new USA was under Thomas Jefferson, who finally dispatched serious forces to the Med to teach the Muzzies of the Maghreb a lesson. They made money by piracy and kidnapping as parasites on the Atlantic and Mediterranean trades, when they weren't smuggling and trading slaves on their own account.
The vast bulk of farmers and peasants may not have known or cared, but international trade was a first-rank concern to elites in DC, London, Paris u.s.w.
'Eli Whitney disliked slavery, and part of his motivation in creating the cotton gin would be to reduce the need for slave labor.'
Bullshit. Everyone knows it was invented by a black guy and Eli stole it.
Along with the airplane, computer, automobile, Vibranium, etc.
Know your history, bigot.
When and where was The Truth Era?
Joe Smith said...
"Everyone knows [the cotton gin] was invented by a black guy and Eli stole it."
True. Eli stole it from from a black inventor, but had to keep the name because everybody knew it was Cotton Gene's machine.
"...Along with the airplane..."
The ancient Black Egyptians had flying machines that archeologists found in the tombs under the pyramids. But the modern airplane was invented by a non-English speaking immigrant from a discriminated against minority group named Gustav Weisskopf. He even Anglicized his name to "Whitehead", but the white powers instead gave credit to those very Anglo Wright brothers. As if some bicycle assemblers knew how to make an airplane!
"...computer..."
Alan Turing was descended from Queen Charlotte, who was Black, so he was Black, too. Little known fact: Since it was illegal to be gay in England, the Turing Test was originally developed to determine if someone was secretly gay.
"...automobile..."
Nicolas Cugnot was born to a French officer and his unit's mixed-race cook whom he brought back to France from Haiti. Nicolas' pressure vessel on his steam powered prototype was his mom's old pressure cooker from when she cooked for the unit.
"...Vibranium..."
Vibranium is only found in meteor strikes on earth. But only Black Wakandan scientists figured out how to use it. But - you say - what about Myron MacLain who created Captain America's shield with it? Yup, descended from Queen Charlotte.
"Know your history, bigot."
The more you know...
There is, and never has been, a "post-Truth era". King Canute sought to turn back the tide, but the tide came in (yes, I know, he never expected anything else; he was demonstrating the limits of political power; I wish our Leftists paid attention to that). The Soviets tried to apply their ideology to agriculture, and the crops failed, and their people starved.
Laws of economics aren't quite as strict as law of physics, but they do exist, and they are knowable. Hasn't the Biden Administration learned anything? Or, if not, haven't they taught us something?
King Canute sought to turn back the tide, but the tide came in (yes, I know, he never expected anything else; he was demonstrating the limits of political power; I wish our Leftists paid attention to that).
But why, you ask? It's a great story, assuming it's truth and not legend.
Canute did it to humiliate the brown-nosers in his court. The obsequious ass-kissing among his courtiers had gone beyond the usual flowery compliments one offered to a medieval king, to the point that one of them enthusiastically declared that Canute was a potentate of such potency that the very winds and waves obeyed his commands. Canute had grown tired of all the ludicrous flattery, and basically replied, "Is that so? Well, let's all go down to the seashore and see if you're right." The entire court decamped for the nearest beach, whereupon:
Canute set his throne by the sea and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not to wet his feet and robes. Yet continuing to rise as usual [it] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.' He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again 'to the honour of God the almighty King'.
Nice discussion of "post-truth." I stopped earlier to wonder at "...one of the most diversely visited museums in the world."
How is that measured? What are the 10 most diversely visited museums? Who does the vetting and ranking?
In South Texas a great many eateries advertise "Authentic Mexican Cuisine." I always ask, but have never found the accrediting organization.
Ironclad said...
I’m certain the museum with the slave ships will have a special exhibit room dedicated to the folks in Africa that rounded up and sold off their tribal and rival brothers to the slave ports
and another exhibit to the millions of white Euros put on slave ships and taken to Africa 700-1800
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