Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Fall of England - Dr David Starkey" video.

  1.  @suntzu94  It was in part thanks to the public traditions we got from Britain that we were able to part company with King George without France's reign of terror, and kept much of the common law precedent instead of having something like the Napoleonic Code. And it was the French monarchy that helped us gain independence, not the French Republic (any of them), though certainly Lafayette had general revolutionary or at least reform notions when he served in the Continental Army. It can hardly be maintained that the elimination of the French monarchy IMMEDIATELY brought about an improvement and advancement of liberty in France or in Europe, much less that it did us any tangible good. And the revolutionary government imprisoned Lafayette and Thomas Paine. While Napoleon conveniently sold us the Louisiana Purchase, he is hardly the champion of liberty he cosplayed as (when he wasn't cosplaying as emperor). Certainly the ideas behind the US Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular find their source in the traditions of the rights of Englishmen, the Magna Carta, and English common law, though I assert we helped the tradition along. If we hadn't provided a relatively benign example of representative government, the UK might well have reacted differently to the French Revolution, if any.
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  2.  @andrewlauder3043  Perhaps that was the population in the context of one of the two historical changes he was referring to.
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  3. The criticism that the words of modernity are shared with English is rather simpleminded. Also shared was the island and the transition to modernity. These words entered Welsh at the same time they entered English. The English language can hardly criticize other tongues for borrowing vocabulary, it's notorious for doing the same. Take away the known loan roots and terms of English and there will be hardly anything of modern English left.
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  4. If you don't understand conversations between adults, you should either prepare yourself, or find something else to do with your time, or failing all else not darken counsel with words without knowledge. Albion is the name of an island. England is not.
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  5.  @suntzu94  I'm pretty sure that wasn't the DE FACTO status quo before Blair, even if it was so DE JURE in British legal theory.
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  6. The British Christian tradition is not the same as the US religious tradition, and the latter does not reduce to fundamentalism. However, Protestantism created the modern libertarian west. We (Protestants) ended slavery; implemented religious freedom, political freedom, academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press FIRST, and thus caused the academic, scientific, technological, and material progress that followed; and most of the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it. What remains of the traditions of Western liberty abide withering as a cut flower, and cannot ultimately outlast their roots. Even such an inveterate opponent of Christianity as Richard Dawkins, who once signed a petition to Parliament to make religious instruction of minor children by parents illegal, now has taken to calling himself a "cultural Christian" as he realizes that modern secularism doesn't have what it takes to fend off Islam. If you can't find your way back to the tradition of Christendom, then I'm sorry, son, you're buggered. Without it, the values that define the West are hanging in epistemological and pedagogical air. Not that I would try to advocate Christianity on purely utilitarian terms. "He who would come to God must believe that He is, and that He is a Rewarder of those who diligently seek Him." If you are unfamiliar with the evidence for Christianity, it is because you haven't looked. But trying to return to the liberal traditions of the West without returning to Christ is just a contradiction of terms.
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  7. As an indictment of the BBC, that's quite valid. As a proposed solution, it is currently impractical.
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  8. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not unique to Christianity. The law of universal beneficence is a common fundamental defining principle of ethics in ethical religions, such as Confucianism and Zorastrianism. One defines madness by reference to a standard of sanity.
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