Notepad

Mostly to help me to track down the posts when I want them again: some links from the livejournal of Fabio Paolo Barbieri, aka FPB, an Italian ex-pat living in London.

I noticed him first as a commenter on John Wright's livejournal, as someone sharp and well-read, and with a great tendency to get into raging arguments - his LJ is full of posts describing how he'd defriended people, or lost friends, over some controversy. I can see why - he wrote a very good post (can't find it now) about modern exaggerations of the witch-burning times (actual body-count: 30,000, although estimates vary, as they do; but feminists and wiccans claim it to be in the millions, on the basis of no good evidence at all); and when someone came along to try and argue that the wiccan myth corresponded in some way to objective reality, his response was to repeatedly lambast them for ignorance and folly, rather than patiently lay out the evidence.

Posts of note:

His criticisms of Margaret Thatcher. Notable comment:

Rupert Murdoch was and is a pornographer. Look at the more "entertaining" broadcasts on Fox, if you cannot have a good look at a copy of The Sun - especially from the eighties. Like Meg, he is all of a piece, and all vile; this is the man who hires and purchases wives - all spectacularly beautiful, of course - and pays them off when he is tired of them. That others do the same does not detract from the sordid nature of the act.

Knowledge: an Essay. Part 1, Part 2.

A post on racism, multiculturalism, and how the British PC classes have shot themselves in the foot:

The government, [a former Labour speechwriter said], had not been remiss in letting in unprecedented waves of immigration. It had done so deliberately, and over a matter of years. Also, one of the main reasons to do so was "to rub the right wing's nose in multi-culturalism and make their views out of date."... Britain was, and it still is, a majority white country with a certain amount of native and immigrant minorities. But nothing could have convinced the PC classes of that; and the secret policy to multiply immigration was nothing but an attempt to make reality closer to "their" reality - much in the same way as the disastrous attempt to bring in women candidates by the hundreds, regardless of ability or experience...

The final results, so far, have been, not only disastrous, but directly counter to their goals. The very things they saw in their nightmares, and that they wanted to ban from the country, are, one by one, coming to pass. A genuine Fascist party, with a neo-Nazi and consciously racist leadership, is now a viable political entity in this country, because immigration has become such an issue. Separately, another group calling itself the English Defence League has sprung up in reaction to perceived outrages against patriotism by Muslim crowds....

The worst thing is that the people who will suffer, if this gets too bad, are immigrant families who went to the UK in good faith. The policy-makers who thought this was such a fantastic idea will probably die in peace and comfort, untouched even if race riots break out.

On euthanasia:

FPB: Thou shalt not kill. Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done to Me.
Shelestel: Interesting. Do you also oppose people who help people who can communicate their wish to die die?
FPB: Ah, in that case we are talking about cowardice. I never thought it was a moral virtue or that it needed to be encouraged. As it happens, I am marginally involved in the disabled movement, and I regard this kind of filth as an excuse to get rid of disabled people by making them feel useless and a burden.
Shelestel: Do you deny the fact that there are people who have to cope with tremendous amounts of pain that has nothing to do with others making them feel useless, and who may in some cases (such as if there is no hope for improvement) wish to put an end to it? Is it this you call cowardice?
FPB: Wherever I hear a person feeling that their life is not worth living, I hear the echo of someone else's selfishness. "Whatever you have done to the least of these you have done to Me" includes "Any time you have allowed or encouraged one of these to feel that the life I gave is not worth living, you have nailed Me to the cross again - and spat in My face for good measure."

A worthwhile post in praise of Sappho, ancient Greek poetess of the island of Lesbia, single-handedly responsible for giving the word "Lesbian" its more common meaning. The trigger for the post was some modern-day scholaress trying to recast Sappho as some kind of feminist mystic. Money graf:

Despite her fame as a poet, everything valuable about her work was totally misunderstood... the Classical world knew that in her work they had something surpassingly beautiful, but did not seem to understand what was so beautiful about it. Her spiritual nobility struck them in parts of their souls that the official culture did not recognize. And so, instead of learning from her how beautiful it is to love and to forgive, all that Athens, heart of the ancient world, could do was tell smutty, homophobic jokes about the small ugly dyke. Her memory was slowly removed, her work, one way or another, lost; and when, twenty-five centuries later, the discovery of Egyptian papyri at last allowed us to reconstruct some sort of poetic corpus, reversing the crime of the ages - this is what we make of her: a political tool for people who know nothing, and care less, for the reality of who she was, how she lived, and why she wrote. Do you understand, now, why I feel ashamed? Here is one of history's losers, a very great woman who has been abused before and after death and for twenty-five centuries since; and instead of finally coming to a proper assessment of her greatness, instead of finally giving her the honour she deserves, instead of taking from her all the precious spiritual values she has to give - this is what our culture does. "In the sixth century BC, Lesbos was ruled by a group of women who had pledged themselves to worship the female principle..." Ye Gods.

A post about the nature of the study of history.

Monasticism and the status of women in the West: an interesting essay which starts by pointing out that feminism didn't invent anything - it held the West to standards it already sort-of accepted. He lists off information about the status of women in the Middle Ages (from what I know not all he says was universally true - I think women had to get men to hold formal ownership of businesses in mediaeval England, but this was purely a formality that didn't stop women from running anything. But he's a historian and I'm not.... Also, IIRC the Middle Ages gave women a higher status than some later centuries - noblewomen had a major role in the typical mediaeval court as diplomats and spreaders of peace, which went away after the Middle Ages were done - I think this role came partly from the pre-Christian Teutonic culture, as a similar role seems to be there in Beowulf), including women rulers. He also points out how things worked in other cultures:

There is an interesting correspondence in this matter between ancient Egypt and China. Both these millenarian empires only ever experienced one regnant Empress in her own right in their three or more millennia of history - Wu Zetian, 690-705AD, and Hathshepsut, 1498-1483BC. The case of the Egyptian regent Sobenkefru is dubious and she is not reckoned in the king lists. And in both cases measures were taken to prevent any further such horror. In both empires, women did in fact exercise a good deal of underhanded power, from the women's quarters, as it were; but no official authority was ever given to them, and emperors who were led by their wives or concubines did not gain respect.

Interesting points about how European attitudes to women struck Muslisms:

In the early nineteenth century, the great Muslim powers - Turkey, Persia, the Muslim states of India - became conscious of their own decline and of the rise of the West... the attention of educated Muslims turned to the West; and many travellers from Muslim countries - highly-educated, attentive, and curious - started visiting Europe. From their visits they brought many suggestions for reform: military, political, administrative/bureaucratic, technological, educational, even musical... But the one thing which, it seems to me, practically every one of them reported back to his country was: you are wasting the energy of half your population. This was how Europe struck intelligent observers, keen for the most practical of reasons to see and understand everything they could, in the early nineteenth century; a period which, in feminist mythology, might as well be the age of slavery.

An even more interesting point about one of the roots of this disparity of attitudes: in aristocratic society, there's very good reasons for keeping women under very strict control:

The higher the rank of the family, outside Europe, the stronger the grip upon the women. And the reason is obvious. By way of marriage, child-bearing and inheritance, women can affect the relationship of clans and family groups with each other. A marriage, in these spheres, is first and foremost an alliance between families; and a failed marriage can break such an alliance. Inheritance, the legitimacy and rank of children, claims to property, questions of rank (in polygamous marriages), all are part of the delicate nexus of interests that meet in the person of a married woman. Hence it becomes terribly important that the marriage be protected. For this reason, touching a royal or imperial woman becomes as dangerous as touching electricity; you can die from a look. For this reason, culture after culture, from Rome to China, from ancient Egypt to imperial Turkey, re-invented, autonomously from each other, the institution of the royal eunuch, delegated to serve and control the royal female quarters. And in culture after culture, independently from each other, the same evolution is seen: the royal eunuch, in turn, acquires the same kind of illegitimate, underhanded power as the women.

In all cultures, that is, except one. No [post-Roman Empire, I assume] European court ever had an establishment of eunuchs; and in no European court were the women's quarters ever reduced to the level of guarded harems.

Fascinating. Why? Well, Christianity insisted that women have a choice of whether to marry - not necessarily of who to marry, but it was an uphill struggle getting aristocratic types to accept that their daughters should have any choice at all. The Church had to insist on this, though, as in Christian theology marriage simply doesn't exist absent consent. But as FPB points out, the option of monasticism was also very important, as an alternative to marriage (and, furthermore, an option which had room for intellectual development, as well). His essay goes into this, but the best summary he gives in the comments:

The effect of monasticism on the status of high-born women was threefold. First, it offered them an escape from the obligation of marriage selected by the family. Second, because of this, it made their assent to marriage an absolutely essential matter rather than a formality - and forced the family to proceed carefully and with respect, since one push too hard and the girl might discover a vocation. Third, it opened to them a number of vocational paths and a career at whose top were powerful independent women who ruled over enormous territories and hundreds of serfs. Being an abbot or an abbess, in medieval terms, meant automatic inclusion in the class of high lords, of "peers" (peers of the king, that is). And that meant in turn that society, especially high society, became used to the presence of powerful women speaking for themselves, and of educated women talking competently with their male counterparts. And the fact that these were permanent features of society, unlike the one-reign wonders of Hathshepsut and Wu Zetian, means that the leadership of society became used to women as free agents rather than chattels. Freedom to choose and reject marriage led to freedom of thought, expression, property, economic and legal action, and so on.

His analysis of British politics is interesting - see here:

Now, the socialist/trades unionist tradition has long been in crisis. It was hijacked by the PC/progressive tradition because, once you have effectively dragged all of Western Europe out of starvation and degradation, what else is there to do? Socialism (by which I do not mean the degenerate and hijacked Russian Communism, but the tradition that was the majority in democratic Western Europe for most of the twentieth century) was effective and successful as long as there was a real enemy to fight. But by the time that popular housing had been effectively reformed, wages regulated, and poverty of the real, starving kind effectively abolished, what was there left to do?...

...the Socialist movement adopted a whole raft of causes which had nothing to do with its historical core, from feminism to greenery to abortion - everything that goes under the label "progressive" or PC. What these things did was to give the movement a surrogate of the campaigning spirit that had been its strength and justification in days past. It became necessary to find ever newer causes to champions, oppressed to defend, progressive ideas to champion - even where these cut right across the interests and traditions of the movement's base. One of the driving motives of socialists and trades unionists across Europe, for instance, had always been to force wages high enough to stop what they regarded as the scandal of women and children working in factories. They wanted families with one breadwinner, and wives at home to look after the house and children. Feminism, of course, wanted the opposite; and one is not surprised to find that the real roots of the feminist movement are in the upper classes, where women confident in their social status and unconsciously stayed by their wealth started making demands that busy working-class mothers rarely shared. Even more astonishing is the case of gay rights. The average union man would be a million miles from the sensibilities of the average homosexual campaigner, a figure if possible even more evidently upper-class than the Pankhursts. The poster-child scandal of homosexual suppression in British history involved an Irish nobleman and a Scottish nobleman; it was received with horror among the upper classes, and with contempt among the working classes. Understand: I do not oppose either. But they never made a natural match for the parties of trades unions and factory workers.

An interesting comment "modern" art, and why it does not deserve to be called modern. Not sure how much his conclusion totally holds, but modern (or post-modern) art wouldn't be as well-off without a copious system of government grants. An interesting point made (I think in the comments) is that (post)modern art regards beauty as an irrelevant consideration, and is increasingly oriented towards criticism - knowledge of modern critical theories is increasingly integral not just to the evaluation but the production of art. The fine artists I've met - not, I should note, total spongers off the governmental teat, but people creating artworks they need to sell to get by - talk of Judith Butler when discussing what they do.

There's a couple of posts on or relating to Pope Pius XII, the man who had the miserable responsibility of leading the Church during World War II. Of particular note is the story of a heroic individual who helped Jewish refugees by putting his mountain-biking skills at the disposal of the Church:

On direct orders from the Pope, every resource of the Catholic Church was made available to hide and disguise Jews and other prospective Nazi victims. The Vatican itself became overcrowded, as were dozens of cathedral closes and hundreds of churches, church schools and monasteries. Cloistered nuns were released from their vows to attend to necessary secret business. The Pope issued the Swiss Guard with machine guns and ordered them to use them if necessary. Everywhere, priests and trusted laymen worked overtime to produce false identity certificates and smuggle dangerous persons from farmhouse to monastery and from monastery to hotel.

One of the most astounding of the many episodes in this epic has only just come to light. The Church recruited one of her most famous lay faithful, the cycling champion Gino Bartali (Tour de France winner, 1938, 1948) and sent him on an impossible mission - cycling from Florence to Assisi and back in one day, to bring to Florence the false documents secretly printed in the town of St.Francis by a local printing-shop owner. The man who discovered the story, history graduate Paolo Alberati, was himself a professional cyclist who competed six times in the Giro d'Italia (1995-2000); but when he tried to match Bartali's exploit, in spite of having a bike half the weight (seven kilos against Bartali's fourteen), better roads and no Nazi patrols to dodge, he could not do it; he broke down half-way back. Bartali did this forty times between 1943 and 1944: forty world-class performances in the most appalling circumstances, more riding than a professional would ordinarily do for prizes, risking his life. He was never caught...

Bartali kept the secret to his grave, and for a long time even his wife and son knew nothing about it. His wife actually could not believe that the cloistered Poor Clare nuns of San Quirico, Assisi, knew her husband, but she went there and they answered - of course, madam, how could anyone be possibly mistaken about a man whose face had been in every newspaper in Europe? When his family asked, his answer was typical: "There's things you just do and don't brag about. I'm no hero, me. I just did the one thing I knew how to do - ride my bicycle."

Beauty is truth: against the claim that knowledge of context is necessary to appreciate a work of genius, FPB produces counterexamples.

A post giving a retrospective on the "evolutionary myth" - the attitude of Progress in all things which predated the scientific theory of evolution but ensured it a ready reception.

A post arguing that atheism is, indeed, a religion... which it is, although it depends a lot on what your definition of "religion" is. Here's a post pondering the rise of the "new atheism", i.e. the fact that the "Sorry Trinity" of Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris are selling a helluva lot of books these days.

He had a couple of posts disputing one Jonah Goldberg's assertion that fascism was a left-wing phenomenon, kin to communism. Being an Italian, FPB takes this as an incitement to rage. An analysis of Mussolini in the context of Italian history; Fascism and the history of Socialist thought.

Here, FPB invites the wrath of about half of America by looking at the 2nd Amendment of the US constitution in historical context. He also takes issue with using NASA as an example of how government tends to do jobs badly.

A discussion on Albus Dumbledore (following on from this), homosexuality, guilt and sin, with a digression on Chesterton:

G.K.Chesterton is probably overall the finest human being I ever experienced, a dazzling combination of stratospheric genius, incredible working power, wonderful personality, and amazing humility. And yet his work is sometimes, in the most unexpected places, disfigured by grotesque and profoundly stupid prejudice, most often against Jews, once at least against blacks. His fierce denunciation of Nazism in the last years of his life was one of the finest of many morally fine and just things he did; yet he still carried with him that strange bacillus. The strangest consequence of this is that he tended to lose his wit. He was not only a Jew-basher, but a dull Jew-basher. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, one of the funniest Englishmen of the twentieth century, could not even make a good anti-Semitic joke.