Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Lotuseaters Dot Com"
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@sevenproxies4255 yeah national sovereignty and cuius regio is about where I've been at for a while too
Personally, for where I happen currently to live, I'm fine with multiculturalism, freedom of religion, etc. but that is because the original wave of settlers, the mutations of whose social values still form the skeleton of our norms for the use of public spaces, had prototypes of those ideas as the whole reason why they left the English Midlands for Philadelphia four centuries ago, and multiculturalism, freedom of religion, etc. are thus fairly organic parts of our civic construct.
I am just very, very comfortable with being friends or cooperating with with any antiliberal or antileftist anywhere in the world, whatever his or her alternative social philosophy, whatever the set of civic norms or ethnic identities inform his or her commitment, because it's very clearly either we get to the left and the liberals over there, or else they'll be trying to get to us over here.
The only asterisk on that for me is the American alliance structure, but that's an asterisk which has lost a point or two in the last few years.
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eh that one is a feature rather than a bug of the English language and one if anything enhanced by the fact that the French language has an official academy. Obviously there's...who was the poet with whom Dr. Johnson had the argument? the one who insisted that English ought to be conjugated like Latin? horrible that his name isn't coming to me right now - at any rate, that guy's views on written English,* and the actual Received Pronunciation accent at the center of the English language, but it rises like a secant of a sphere out of ever-lapping liminal local pidgins. Naturally, we need to have "good English" so that English continues to be a thing - when the axis to the apex of the secant has a value of zero, then there is no secant, for all intents and purposes - thus certain conventions must thus always be granted the status of primus inter pares in order for mutual intelligibility to be achieved, but "bad English" is in and of itself is not anything not to celebrate. Any weird island where a bunch of poms ran a racket three hundred years ago no doubt has its own local pidgin, dialect, and accent; any random immigrant neighbourhood in any English-speaking part of the world has its shorter-lived versions of the same thing; really every last one of the more prominent dialects of English outside of England are products of these two processes run to one extreme or another; and those things are good. English is a...damn my vocabulary today, the quality of looseness in sexual mores, a promiscuous language, combining with loan words to indicate concepts more efficiently expressed by other languages without self-doubt. Neither ought preexisting local distinctions be removed nor ought the organic evolution of an approaching uncountable number of neologisms be resisted. *John Dryden. "Good English" is John Dryden grammar and a Received Pronunciation accent. Everything else is a bit down the curvature of the secant toward being a pidgin. "From where did the rule not to end a sentence with a preposition come?" is the way in which one asks Google that question.
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In the Middle Ages, sure, somebody who was, for instance, a reasonably senior Benedictine monk might have had a sense of common connection to other Latin-speaking Roman Catholic literate elites - or to fellow Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslim literate elites in the case of, say, a translator for a Mameluke vizier. However, ordinary people generally did not read and write and written materials were very restricted as the printing press had yet to be invented, and thus tended to identify with a specific village or quarter of a town - in terms of concrete day-to-day physical relationships. That's the line between where Dr. Beckeld begins to go in this clip and the Benedict Anderson view of a nation, which is the result of print media and a set of literate middling and lower orders, which come to see themselves as representing a similar sort of imagined community based on what they come to view as either a common ethnic origin and connection to the land, a common set of civic values, or some other set of underlying assumptions maintained in the popular imaginary as transmitted by mass media. To insinuate that a nation can be an elite project alone thus erodes the coherence of a lot of the way this stuff has been discussed, if I do not mistake my limited education on the subject.
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