Stefan Molyneux answers the musical question “why do good girls like bad guys?”

Back on the subject of mail armour, I’m given to understand that a sling bullet was much feared in the ancient world as the way it focused force at the point of impact could inflict severe injury without even going through a mail shirt. Loved the mental image of a knight ‘hay bale’ tossed by an angry peasant.

@Ohlmann:

On a side note, I am deeply anxious about the Brexit. Oh boy, I didn’t *think* anyone could fuck up a political process that badly.

So you’re not familiar with our Tories? Their combination of incompetence and malevolence is rivalled only by the DUP.

I don’t know whether I want an extension to Article 50, because I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand.

@Anonymous

Ahalan! I didn’t know there was another Israeli here. 🙂

I was just talking to someone today about that stupid Blazer thing, and the thing is, they’re not even original. I remember reading on this very blog about a US conservative thinker who brought up the “redistribution of sex” thing as a sort of gotcha, as in “how come you think this is stupid but not welfare?!” (not seeing the obvious answer that sex is not a resource that can be [re]distributed). It was stupid then, and it’s stupid now.
And of course, as has been pointed out above, the intention to troll doesn’t actually matter, because the actions are still reprehensible. Trolling or not, they were still treating women’s bodies as a commodity.

I always think it’s funny when people go on and on about how cool knights were because they actually weren’t super useful on the mdeieval battlefield. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they look awesome and they’re super fun to portray in any kind of medieval fantasy media, but in actual medieval times, it was archers that won battles.

Though “city” and “civilization” are hard to pin down due to being hard to define, it’s generally accepted that the oldest continuously inhabited areas are as much as 11,000 years old. Damascus and Jericho date to that age, though again, the definition of “city” is debated.

For me, the beginning of farming is the trigger date. Once we started growing crops and domesticating stock, moving around became less necessary and more difficult. We had already built semi-permanent houses at least from the end of the last glacial maximum, and the necessity of shelter would instantly drive the invention of permanent building technology.

This took place in a bunch of different places after the ice age, southwest Asia, south Asia on the Indian sub-continent, southeast Asia in the Mekong delta, and several places in east Asia. Farming, permanent dwellings, music, art, shamanism… likely even money, as there’s evidence of decorative shells which some paleoanthropologists believe were used as money… that’s definitely “civilization”, though you do need traffic jams to properly call it a “city.”

Regarding “civilization” as defined by the white supremacist movement, well, we had (probably) already invented war, and the Chalcolithic (copper) Age was just around the corner, where we invented metal weapons. Bad idea. Should’a left that one alone.

Can I just say that I LOVE how this thread has become a discussion of ancient and medieval history? ?❤

One of the things that I learned after college was how the current languages of Europe came from a prehistoric population shift/possible invasion from the Proto-Indo-European homeland to the east. That’s why the various forms of pre-Christian European religions had such similar pantheons, for example.

@Dallilama : after checking again to be sure, I am sorry to have to say you’re full of shit.

First thing first : celts invented cities too with the oppidas. They arrived in France at about the same time (well, at more or less the same centurie) as greeks. Greeks who didn’t built anything in France in -2800 because greek civilisation was just starting ; to give you an idea, the Minoans had a big city by -2700 and that’s about the earliest form of Greek civilisation we have trace of. (Greek weren’t particulary early by city’s standard, we just know a lot about them because of cultural bias)

Unlike what you say, we don’t have a complete history of french cities, because cities can vanish without leaving a trace. Pretending we know everything about that is on par with saying that North America did not have any city before Columbus found the American continent.

You also spew out (french) white supremacists points by seeing cities come only from the greeks. In actual practice, we don’t know all the place where something as basic as agriculture and cities with govermeents were invented, because thoses things leave very few traces. You probably have good intentions saying that, unlike the white supremacists, but that don’t make what you say, you know, true.

Podkayne Lives:

This is…not true. Even if we let Greeks count as ‘white’ for this ludicrously anachronistic claim.

Yeah, not to engage with the rest of Molyneux’s ridiculous, racist, misogynist argument, but the Greeks did not see themselves as “white” in the slightest. They saw themselves as Greek and they were incredibly disdainful of and discriminatory of those peoples that did not fit into that quasi-ethnic linguocultural category. Hell, they barely considered the ruling class of Macedon to be Greek, largely on the basis of small differences like their political system and their drinking habits.

The great minds of ancient Athens would almost certainly view Molyneux as a Celt and therefore a barbarian congenitally incapable of fully utilizing, let alone appreciating, the fullness of Greek civilization. To put it another way, Aristotelian racial theory held that the four races (Greek, Persian, Celtic, and Scythian) possessed the cardinal virtues in different amounts due to their culture and their climate. Celts like Molyneux had courage and justice but not wisdom and moderation, while Persians possessed all but moderation and Scythians lacked all but courage. Only Greeks, with their mountainous yet temperate homeland, had both the reason and the energy to create civilization.

This is, by the way, a big part of the “scientific progress” that Molyneux is so eager to claim as his heritage: climatological racism.

James Hutchings:

Yeah, the four-part division of humanity introduced by Hippocrates of Kos and developed by Plato and Aristotle was definitely a post-hoc excuse to use culture and geography to sort humanity into graduated degrees of similarity to the Greeks. To them, the meaningful distinctions were a) living in cities, b) using similar culinary and hygienic practices, c) having sophisticated political structures, and d) speaking Greek. These criteria were, of course, applied in extremely inconsistent and self-serving ways, like in the case of the Celts (a category which encompassed all the inhabitants of Europe west of the Danube) being considered filthy because Greeks didn’t understand or like the smell of soap. It’s a proto-race theory that was, at the very least, functional, as opposed to the self-destructive hypocrisies of white supremacy, even though it backed the Greeks just as much into a corner as people like Molyneux are feeling that they are now.

Romans are more interesting in their understanding of race because it was even more sociopolitically informed. There was a great monograph that I read maybe half a decade back about how Rome, by the time of the Principate, considered itself a universal empire that ruled the entire world. The meaningful distinction to the Romans, then, was who lived under “organized” rule (that is, under Roman rule) and who lived under “unorganized” rule (that is, under the rule of anyone else). There were still ethnic hatreds, like were seen when Gauls were admitted to the Senate under Claudius, but there wasn’t a more meaningful meta-category under which to organize those hatreds.

Anyway, that’s a lot of ink spilled to say that whiteness is made up and it’s laughable that Molyneux would try to claim the accomplishments of people who would consider him an illiterate barbarian (keeping in mind that, to the Romans and to most Europeans in the Middle Ages, “literacy” meant being able to speak and read Latin). Not to mention an entertainer (using that term loosely)! Lowest of the low.

Stefan Molyneux: the worst thing to happen to Canada since the October Crisis.

@Ohlmann

Greeks who didn’t built anything in France in -2800 because greek civilisation was just starting

Please do note the difference between “~2800 years ago” and “in -2800”. Tildes are used to indicate approximation, but even without that “x years ago” is a relative point in time, not an absolute one. I suspect Dalillama refers to Marseille, which appears to have been founded around that sort of time (though I see figures of about 600BC rather than 800). That certainly gives it a reasonable claim to be the oldest city in what is now France, though as you’ve observed this doesn’t mean that it brought civilization as such.