Is the hashtag #FightForWesternCivilization the worst thing on Twitter today?

@PI

I use gravatar personally

Trying it out. Alright, moment of truth. Did it work? Turquoise peace…

@Oogly
Awwwwwwwww, shit!
http://4closurefraud.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/donkey-kong.jpg

I first came to terms with how different my conception of what “western civilization” was to the alt-right’s definition when I came into contact with William Lind’s Victoria. I loved what I considered Western Civilization; stuff like human rights, democracy, open society, individualism, scientific and technological dynamism*, etc. But the protagonists of this work claim to support western civilization while destroying all these things.

It has become apparent to be that there are two incompatible visions of what Western Civilization. One I’d call “Enlightenment Civilization” which is what I’d support. And “Classical Western Civilization” that looks further back to things like the Crusades, the Romans. Seeing the time when white men oppressed black people and women as being the pinnacle rather than a darker time before western civilization came into its current standard of conduct.

*In Victoria the ‘utopia’ achieved by the end also regresses back to 1930s technology except for the military and medicine.

@FreedomGeek ; TBH, the civilization they want to come back to never actually existed. It’s more that they project their fantasm on thoses poor romans and dark age guys. When they weren’t *that* evil, because that level of stupidity hinder survival, and they weren’t rich enough to be able to do that.

And Dave, is there some way you could change all my past comments so they’re under ‘joekster’? Thanks.

@Oogly: LOVE THOSE PICS!

How did the cat get up to the window blinds in the first place?

And that beardie looks quite content in the purple sweater.

Is the nazi gone?

Here’s a “fun” fact. I was in the area, visiting a friend. I stayed inside because of a personal disgust of national holidays and patriotic/militaristic displays – and July 14 has a lot of that.

That disgust is the reason why I’m still alive. In light of this hashtag… well the irony tastes even more bitter now.

Interestingly, both Genghis Khan and his son, Ogedei, had plans to invade Western Europe. Ogedei even destroyed a joint Hungarian/Polish army somewhere in Eastern Europe, but I don’t recall the name of the battle off hand. As I recall, the Europeans were hobbled by all that ironwork they were carrying around. Both Khans died of natural causes before they got around to launching that planned invasion. Fortunately for the West, Mongol succession appears to have required all mongol forces going back home to fight over who got to be the next Khan.

Those were the battles of Legnica (9 April 1241) and Sajó River (11 April 1241.) The European defeats were less about heavy armour and more about the fact that Europeans were really bad at actual wars. The Mongols and their allies (Cumans and Turks) were a professional army who understood strategy and logistics; the Europeans outnumbered them but were mostly an aristocratic force trained to put down peasant rebellions and fight one-on-one duels, not to fight wars.

Shortly after the two battles, the Khan died and the Mongol generals needed to return to Mongolia with their armies, according to succession laws.

At Sajó River, also known as Mohi, it wasn’t just the Hungarians who lost; the army was mostly Austrian and Imperial, and represented most of the available forces of the German states. Had the Mongols not turned back, there was no army left between them and the Rhine, and it is unlikely that they could have been stopped before they reached Portugal. Europe could have been conquered, and it’s interesting to speculate on what would have happened if it had. It might have been to our benefit; a unified European state may have resulted in the same way as the Mongols created unified Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Indian states.

@Ohlmann Alexander reminds me much more of Ogedei than Ghengis, son of a powerful ruler who was very successful but probably ruined it by drinking himself to death at an early age.

@Sinkable John

So glad to hear that you are alive and unhurt! Hopefully your friend and the families of you both are also safe.

It must be really awful to know, on top of the horror and tragedy of the attack, that you came so close to being a direct victim to it. It’s normal to be shaken and in shock – Hugs, if you want them.

As they say, war is bad for all living things. It is the single most atrocious waste of resources (both human and natural) in our world. If I had to find something good to say about war, or die, I’d choose death. I have always thought that the reason men are encouraged to be angry and violent and repress most of their emotions (toxic masculinity) is because of the unquenchable thirst for cannon fodder throughout recorded history (which always seem to be mostly the record of wars). They are TOLD that they need to fight to protect “their” women — women, after all, may not fight to the same extent but they are victims just about as often. The guys you hear howling about how men have to die to defend women have just one big thing wrong — it’s not women who start wars and demand that men go fight them. I’m always nervous about women in the military because — although I understand equality — if women ever become thoroughly militarized, I don’t think there’s much hope for the survival of humanity.

People ask what it was like to be in prison. I was in Danbury, now more famous than it was in the days when the called it the Country Club, and it was a relatively soft prison filled with relatively low-violence prisoners . There was one very bad attack while I was there — six Puerto Rican guys with baseball bats and barbell bars ganged up on a French-Canadian guy they thought was a snitch. Afterwards I realized I was never in that great danger — but before you go in, you hear lots of stories, and in prison culture a draft resister is considered by definition gay (real men fight) and is subject to being treated like a woman would be on the outside. So I always like to say that Danbury was like a bad inner-city high school where they don’t let you go home at night. I think I came out stronger — my schizophrenic former wife suffered a lot more than I did. I was a sheltered, cosseted white boy who needed to learn a bit about real life. That’s where I learned a lot about how America treats black people (who were a majority in Danbury).

I met only one inmate who had served time at Alcatraz – he was close to Mandatory Release and they we trying to help him adjust to a lower level of control. I tried to befriend him but had to give up because he interpreted everything I did as a sexual advance. I suspect most women have had to give up friendships for this reason.

When I saw the short-lived Trump logo, my thought was that it reeked of power and dominance. The T-fucking-P seemed to me a symbolic assertion of the alpha male’s domination of a subordinate through sexual means rather than anything concerning consensual gay sex. In my view, his rape of Ivana was to assert his dominance; to say, in effect, you’re my wife, and I get to say when you get fucked. I think that Trump himself has an insecurity that leads to an inordinate need to constantly assert his Alphaness. It’s interesting to compare him to Obama, who always seems comfortable in his own skin and seems to rarely feel the need to consciously act like a stereotypical male. With Trump, I sometimes feel that his only real motivation is the cheering of the crowds — he’s so addicted to that that it becomes the end in itself rather than a means to getting elected. It seemed to me that whoever designed the logo was (subconsciously, at least) revealing a lot more about the reality of TrumPence than they would have wanted to.

@John: agree with above. Glad you’re safe, and I hope you recover well from the shock. Good luck.

@GrumpyOld: That sounds like a rather terrible experience. Thank you for sharing it.

@JoeB, Ohlman: thanks for the corrections and education. It’s been a long time since my east Asia civilizations course in undergrad. I’ve often wondered where we’d be now if the mongols ever had kept going West. I don’t know how much luck they’d have had crossing the English Channel (Kublai Khan didn’t do well with the Sea of Japan, but that’s a totally different body of water and Kublai was not Ogedai), but other then that, I do recall that they stood a good chance of sweeping Europe.

From what I remember (there are obviously people here more learned than I on this), the Mongol occupation was rather destructive, especially to civilizations that attempted to resist them. It’s been almost a decade since my classes on this, but I recall learning that the nation we now call Afghanistan was one of those, and that the Mongols went so far as to fill in all the wells in the region, which the region still has not recovered from.