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SnorriGodhi

Listed below are comments made by SnorriGodhi between Tuesday, 2nd June 2009 and Tuesday, 9th June 2009.

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March of the right 09:11am on 09 Jun 2009 Anonymous Californian: please note that the EU Liberals have nothing to do with American "liberals": some of the Liberal parties in the EU are more market-liberal (or is that market-libertarian?) than the EPP; e.g. the Estonian Reform party makes the US Republicans look like socialists.

Personally, I think that the words "liberal" and "right" (including "far-right") should be banned from politics altogether, because they are arbitrary groupings of people with nothing in common, and the use of these words indicates sloppy thinking. I could do without the word "left", too.
Invasion relived 3:26pm on 08 Jun 2009 Democracythreat: thank you for your reply. You might be right that life was worse (or at least, less free) in Western Europe during the Roman Empire than it was before. You might also be right that a money economy can make slavery more onerous: it is enough to think of slavery in Arab lands, the West Indies, or the Belgian Congo. But surely, the solution is to abolish slavery, not to abolish money; and it seems to me that money made it possible to abolish slavery, because without a money economy we could not afford the luxury of moral scruples about slavery. (But it's a 2-way street: before the abolition of slavery, there was little incentive for technological innovation, so the economy did not grow.)

Anyway, given that slavery has now been abolished, I don't think that your comparison of Roman times to the present time is relevant.
March of the right 3:18pm on 08 Jun 2009 Do I detect a suggestion in this article that a tougher line on immigration is the most effective way to contain the "far-right"? the problem with that is that many political parties, especially but not only in Britain, have painted themselves into a corner: they identify any opposition to immigration (and/or the EU) with the "far-right", so they cannot take a tough line on immigration without becoming "far-right" by their own definition. The main parties have effectively destroyed their own freedom of speech in a futile attempt to undermine the BNP.

It is important to keep in mind that British culture has been derided and despised by the British elite for much of the last century; one unintended and unpleasant consequence is that opposition to immigration is centered on race, not culture. The situation is different in (most of) continental Europe.

Speaking of British culture: Moncursalion-Occamist (#3) talks of a natural alliance between the Tories (some of them, anyway) and the Nazis. Apparently, he is unaware that the champions of antisemitism and eugenics in Britain before ww2 were the Fabians, and that Oswald Mosley quit the Labour Party because it was not socialist enough.
Invasion relived 07:41am on 08 Jun 2009 PS: I did not notice Democracythreat's wild claim, that the Romans were the first to combine slavery and commerce, before Jan Keeskop replied to it. I would be hard pressed to mention a single state society that did not practice both slavery and commerce, before European slavery turned into serfdom. (And in fact, slavery and commerce were widely practiced even in pre-state societies.) Certainly Athens practiced both, but maybe Sparta did not practice commerce. I'd be surprised to learn that the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians traded in slaves, but did not keep any for themselves. My understanding is that the Roman Empire was not particularly keen on commerce, either; but apparently Democracythreat makes no distinction between commerce and colonial exploitation.
Invasion relived 07:16am on 08 Jun 2009 Jan Keeskop: thank you for your reply. To keep it short, I'll just answer your question: the Carthaginians were the last important outpost of Phoenician culture, and the Phoenicians invented the first alphabet, the "parent" of the Greek alphabet, which in turn was the parent of the Latin alphabet. The Phoenicians might have made other important contributions of which I am not aware, possibly due to the fact that they were not as keen on writing history as the Greeks and Romans.
Invasion relived 5:04pm on 07 Jun 2009 Gheryando:

all your claims are easy to state and impossible to verify

Impossible to verify? is it impossible to verify that the Roman Empire was a slave based society? is it impossible to verify that life expectancy did not increase in 1000 years of Roman history? and even if they are impossible to verify, will you not admit that they are, at least, falsifiable? (sensu Popper, of course.)

We could have been this, we could have used that...

I made a single claim of that kind:
we could have managed with another alphabet and another calendar.
Do you disagree?

Sure you could have been the child of some other parents. But you aren't.

Make no mistake: if anything had been different in history up to 9 months before you were born, and I do mean ANYTHING, then you would not have been born at all. The same for me and everybody else, of course. But that does not mean that I must approve of all the evil committed before I was born.
Invasion relived 11:49am on 07 Jun 2009 Jan Keeskop:
Be careful when mentioning Roman law here, because you might remind people that there is an alternative: the Common Law. That suggests to me that continental Europe could also have done without Roman law.

In fact, if you read the Icelandic sagas, you'll find that the rule of law and separation of powers were not unknown to illiterate barbarians, at a time when they had been forgotten for centuries in former Roman lands.

Similarly, we could have managed with another alphabet and another calendar.

As for the Life of Brian list of Roman contributions, it seems to me that the potato alone was more important than all of them put together, if the criterion is the improvement of European life expectancy and quality of life. If the criterion is to have impressive monuments, that's another story.

In short, Roman achievements do not look sufficiently impressive to persuade me to cheer a society based on slavery in a war of dubious merit.
Invasion relived 11:24pm on 06 Jun 2009 Oh well, I'll just have to type my comment in again.

After studying Roman history in elementary, junior high, and senior high school, I am still unable to answer Monty Python's immortal question: what have the Romans ever done for us??

Two facts stand out for me: first, there is no evidence that all the fabled Roman technology did anything to increase life expectancy in a millennium of Western Roman history; second, slavery disappeared from Europe only after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

On the other hand, if what I read about human sacrifice in Carthage is true, then I am not for Carthage, either. I guess that I'll sit this one out. I hesitate to say this, but it's a bit like asking whether I'd be cheering Hitler or Stalin.
Legacy of invasion 09:03am on 04 Jun 2009 For Rome or for Carthage? After studying Roman history in elementary, junior high, and senior high school, I am still unable to answer Monty Python's immortal question? what have the Romans ever done for us? In fact, the more history I read, the more perplexed I am. Two facts stand out for me: first, life expectancy did not increase in a millennium of Roman history; second, slavery within Europe disappeared only after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

On the other hand, if what I heard about human sacrifice in Carthage is true, then I am not going to be for the other side.
A walk on the Wilders side 4:16pm on 02 Jun 2009 The real problem is that Mark Mardell's colleagues have been screaming wolf, at the top of their lungs, for way too long: now it is difficult to take Mr. Mardell as seriously as he deserves. What I mean is, there was a time when the "far-right" was anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic. Leave aside the fact that the "far-left" shares these features. My point is that the definition of "far-right" has been broadened, first to include all xenophobes, then to include anybody opposed to immigration of any or all ethnic groups, then to anybody opposed to the EU project, and now to anybody opposed to the Lisbon Treaty. At the same time, in some contexts it is enough to whisper "freedom of speech" to be labeled "far-right". In short, any form of dissent from the political orthodoxy is becoming "far-right", unless it is explicitly far-left. At this point, it is nothing more than a tautology that the "far-right" gains support at a time when trust in the establishment is in dramatic decline: since the far-left has nothing positive to offer anymore, any decrease in support for the establishment is now _by definition_ an increase in support for the "far-right".

BTW Reagan was also supposed to be "far-right" and was going to start a nuclear war, as I remember. GW Bush was also "far-right" and was going to set up a theocratic dictatorship. I can't remember any leader writer, or any public "intellectual", admitting that they got those predictions wrong.

BTW (2): I didn't think that heer Wilders is as anti-capitalist as Mr. Mardell (or rather, Dr Pijpers) makes him out to be; I'll look it up. But certainly Wilders is neither anti-American nor anti-Semitic, so he is not part of the traditional "far-right".

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