A friend kindly sent this item along, a posting in Quora in which a British subject, Mr Andrew Sutcliffe, provides answer to the blindingly silly question: “Why do Brits on Quora glorify the UK’s past so passionately[?]”
Before posting Mr Sutcliffe’s worthy reply, your Tatler, an 11th generation American, would like to post his own answer to the question in question. The UK’s past is glorified because of all the empires in recorded history, and no doubt those earlier, the British Empire was not only the greatest in suze, but in administration as well. Unlike any empire in the past, the British, when taking on a new territory, sought to improve the lot of its inhabitants via, inter alia, crushing tribal warfare, establishing education, a functioning civil service, basic civil amenities like clean drinking water and roads, and the greatest of its legacies, the the fairest legal system the world has ever known. It would be hard to top those accomplishments and likely they never will be.
Now then, to Mr Sutcliffe’s superb reply, slightly edited via the use of links for brevity.
I seem to recall that we had something to do with the Westminster Ideal of democracy, and were one of the first nations to ban slavery, and may have had something to do with steam engines and railways, jet engines, penicillin, radio, television, the reflecting telescope, the modern toothbrush, the agricultural revolution, the tin can, the Thermos flask, the hovercraft, the pneumatic tyre, the Bessemer Process, the Mackintosh coat, the telegraph, the chocolate bar, the fire extinguisher, the Cats Eye in the road, the ATM, the World Wide Web, the hydraulic press, the barrel lawnmower, the light bulb (I know this is contentious but Joseph Swan just pipped Thomas Edison to the post), the first electric motor, the underground railway, the modern sewage system, Portland cement, the flying shuttle in weaving, tarmac roads, the safety (i.e. modern layout) bicycle, soda water, the telephone, the power loom, the arc lamp, the match, vaccines, the first cloned animal, the military tank, and did I mention the abolition of slavery? Perhaps I should mention it again, as in the newspeak of the modern woke world we are given very little credit for this. In this respect please see
and see, if to your surprise, some questions may suggest themselves to you. And please apply the cynical, mistrusting eye and thought processes of those who seek to denigrate the British and all their works and ask yourself how the biggest slave trader on the West Coast became a national hero with the largest square in Lagos City named after her. And whose family run Lagos State.
In the meantime, we dismantled the largest empire the world had ever seen, and did so at the request of the inhabitants: only the USA (the creation of which we may also take, somewhat ashamedly, some credit for) ever fought and won a war of independence against us. And then went on to create a Commonwealth of Nations which nations not even former members of the empire seek to join.
We also helped to defeat German Militarism in 1918 and Nazi Fascism in 1945.
But now we are assailed by the baying bullies of the left. We did nothing good, Churchill was as bad if not worse than Hitler, pictures of victims of inter-ethnic violence are mis-labelled as victims of the Bengal Famine,
These people above were killed in fighting between Moslems and Hindus, it’s an old, old, old story. They were not starved by the British, yet again and again on Quora newly minted racist fascist Indian nationalists make that claim. And they forget that the British banned suttee and stopped thuggee.
I’m fed up with neck-beards and creatures with bits of carpet woven into their hair trying their best to undermine and destroy something so much better than they are that if the British Empire wiped its arse on these people, it’d improve them beyond measure. And I will disable comments because I do not want to get into slanging matches with the hopelessly mentally enfeebled.
Your Tatler, aka Bickerstaff, especially applauds Mr Sutcliffe’s observation that horrors as seen in the photograph above would never have occurred in British colonies, at least not if they could possibly have been stopped. Incidents like that resulted in the aftermath of the adults leaving the room, leaving tribalists and putative nationalists in charge, who unleashed their fury on all those they despised, that is those who were different from themselves.
We need look no further than our own country to see nascent examples of such hideous behaviors occuring here.
One of the late Queen Elizabeth’s official acts was inviting the newly elected Conservative Prime Minister, Elizabeth “Liz” Truss to Balmoral and ask her to form a new government. Protocol forbids the monarch taking sides in politics, but this writer likes to believe HM the Queen was greatly pleased with PM Truss. Certainly that smile on her face in the photo above is hardly pasted on.
Mere speculation, fantasy perhaps, but your Tatler wonders if the late Queen was able to push death away just long enough to see to it a solid and competent conservative, who many compare with the late Mrs Thatcher, put back into No. 10.
In the spring 2022 semester, College Republicans at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution attempted to invite The Daily Wire host, a practicing Catholic, to speak. The university denied the request due to Knowles’ past statements related to past comments expressing socially conservative opinions.
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Emails obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reveal that the university cited Knowles’ previous comments on transgender ideology when they rejected the request.
Knowles himself put it succinctly. “My disinvitation from the University of St. Thomas is particularly ironic because I was disinvited specifically for espousing Catholic views.”
Truly Catholics colleges and universities in this country are remarkably few. Most of the putatively Catholic educational powerhouses are indistinguishable from their secular equivalents; they have gone to the devil.
Newsmax has put together a helpful list of ten traditional Catholic colleges. Their names are copied below, with links, but one should go to the article in Newsmax to read the capsule descriptions of them.
If any readers know of other traditional Catholic colleges or universities, kindly inform your Tatler of them and they will be added to the list.
Note: This list from Newsmax is seven years old, aeons in Internet time. Some the links, and in one case, the name of the college, have changed, which your Tatler has tried to emend (readers’s corrections are welcome). Also, in the intervening seven years, the missions of some of these institutions may have veered off the narrow way (Matthew 7: 14). A quick glance at an institutions’s website should betray any wanderings.. Helpful hint: do a search for these three words: “diversity,” inclusivity,” and “equity.” If they pop up, close that window pronto and click on the next link.
3. Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (Warning: Bickerstaff has heard rumors CUA is getting soft. If readers have any knowledge of that, please post it in the comments.)
7. Wyoming Catholic College, Lander, Wyoming. (This is Bickerstaff’s favorite and one to which he is a donor. Not only is WCC’s curriculum absolutely sound, they also offer extra-curriculars unlike like any others.)
ATLANTA, GA — CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky held a press conference to warn the public about a deadly new “stealth” COVID-19 variant that causes negative test results and causes no symptoms.
“This deadly variant has bypassed our most sophisticated tests by ingeniously becoming harmless to the human body,” said Director Walensky, “It is estimated that eight billion people have caught this variant. We must prevent it from spreading further by closing schools and locking up kindergarten children.”
The excellent veteran blogger Ann Althaus gives us an excerpt from the Times article, which is pay-walled.
[The playwright Charlie] Josephine said the decision to make Joan nonbinary came after studying Joan’s life and realizing that Joan of Arc had been willing to die at the stake rather than stop wearing men’s clothing. This was “not a casual fashion statement,” Josephine said. “It was a deep need for them.” Josephine wanted to depict what it would have been like for “a young person in a female body, who is questioning gender in a very different society than what we live in now,” they said. “My younger self really needed a protagonist like this,” they added…
Althaus adds:
A quote from the Globe’s artistic director: “Everyone’s got an idea of how plays should be done and how historical figures should be treated. All ‘I, Joan’ was doing, [said], was asking, ‘Who is Joan for now?'”
Do the play-makers care about Joan‘s identity — to herself — or are they appropriating her interest in her own identity for their purposes? I see an inherent contradiction.
To put it mildly. The army of woke continues its dreary and depressing march through the western canon. Nothing in its path is safe.
Steven Kruiser on Donald Trump’s speech lastnight in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
What the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are doing is making Trump a living martyr. Their repeated unforced errors — especially the J6 kangaroo court — are fuel for Trump. His oversized personality soaks up their frothing pettiness and turns it into political gold. (italics added)
On September 2nd, the President of the United States gave a presidential, i.e., paid for by the taxpayers, address in which he accused Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans, 71 million of them, of representing “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” essentially telling all of us we had better chose sides, which your Tatler infers as a warning there is trouble ahead for those who chose wrong.
Here is one of those persons on the wrong side. Listen to what he has to say.
It is well worth reading Lee Smith’s article in the Tablet in its entirety, but in a nutshell it appears the FBI’s purpose raiding Mar-a-Lago was, as rumored, the retrieval of documents proving it and the CIA’s extensive involvement in the so-called RussiaGate conspiracy to remove President Trump from office. Trump seems to have taken them with him when leaving office and if he chose to declassify them, which was certainly his privilege, he could do whatever he wants with them. Knowing Trump, he could do so bigly. We thus may imagine a panic-stricken FBI desperately wanting to get those documents out of his hands.
The corker of Smith’s story though is his highly believable proposition the documents the FBI and CIA, as well the entire Biden administration, are so eager to get hold of may not have been among those confiscated from Mar-a-Lago; that despite received opinion among the left Trump is too stupid to know his right from left, he obviously knew what those imbeciles were up to and took care to remove the incriminating documents elsewhere. Who knows, perhaps he even had multiple copies made to stash in various locales.
If Trump is indicted, as so many Bidenistas are clamoring for, and if he still has the documents, he could then release them which, as Smith states, could well bring down the FBI, the CIA and possibly the entire Biden administration.
We’ll quote directly Smith’s dramatic conclusion to his story.
What is preserving the stability of the United States at present is therefore something like a Mexican standoff. Does Trump actually have the documents? If so, will he put them before the public? Will Garland indict him, and risk finding out? Given the Biden administration’s tendency to instrumentalize the violence of its rhetoric and turn federal bureaucracies loose on its political opponents, it is likely that the standoff will not hold for long.
UPDATE: Breitbart reports among the items seized were 43 file boxes marked “classified.” They turned out to be empty. What might have been in them, we wonder.
THE TAOS TATLER. 