Current events Archives - Page 8 of 12 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Donald Trump Is No Patriot

On 17 September 2020, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the “White House Conference on American History,” an event at the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. In this speech, Trump claimed that United States history teachers all across the country who are radical leftists and who hate America are using their positions to indoctrinate schoolchildren into what he regards as a dangerous and evil anti-American ideology, which he claims is causing “riots and mayhem” all over the country.

Therefore, he has promised to issue an executive order to “restore patriotic education to our schools” by establishing a “1776 Commission” to “encourage” teachers across the country to only teach American history in a way that inspires patriotism and makes students proud to be Americans.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want teachers to talk about any of the bad stuff that the United States has done. He wants real history to be thrown out of schools and a heavily sanitized, jingoistic narrative to be taught instead. The full transcript of Trump’s speech is available on the White House’s official website. Here is my response to some of the things he said.

What Would Really Happen If We Abolished the Police?

Right now, there are a lot of people who are advocating for police departments to be reformed or defunded, but there is another idea that a very small number of people have begun advocating, which is the idea that the entire police force should be just permanently abolished altogether.

This idea seems shocking at first. Most people assume that, if the police force were completely abolished, the result would be complete chaos and people would go out murdering other people in the streets with no one to stop them and it would be like The Purge. This is, however, extraordinarily unlikely.

The fact of the matter is that we can actually have a pretty good idea of what society would be like if we abolished the police, since—believe it or not—for most of human history, there was no police force. In fact, the idea of having a police force is actually fairly modern. Nonetheless, as I will discuss in this article, permanently abolishing the police is still probably not a good idea—just not for the reasons most people think.

The Hagia Sophia Is Now a Mosque

The Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was built by the Byzantines in the sixth century AD as a Christian church. It was the largest and arguably the most famous Christian church in the world for nearly a thousand years. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque and, after the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey, it was converted into a museum.

Then, on 10 July 2020, amidst international outcry, the Turkish government officially converted it back into a mosque. On 21 August 2020, the Chora Church, another famous Byzantine church in İstanbul that had previously been converted into a mosque and then a museum, was converted back into a mosque as well.

These decisions, in particular the decision regarding the Hagia Sophia, have triggered a great deal of international debate. Unfortunately, there is a very long and complex history behind this discussion that is often left out. In order to fully understand this debate, we need to talk about the history of the Hagia Sophia, who built it, why it was turned into a mosque to begin with, and why it was later turned into a museum.

Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World

It is popularly believed that transgender, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people only started existing fairly recently and that they are an aberration of modern times. This could not possibly be further from the truth. It is true that the word “transgender” is fairly new, since it was first coined in 1965, but there have been people whom we might consider transgender ever since at least the beginning of recorded history.

In this article, I want to talk about some examples of figures from ancient history, mythology, and literature whom we might consider transgender, intersex, or otherwise gender-nonconforming. Some of these people are fictional; others of them are historical. Not all of them fit perfectly under our modern definition of “transgender,” but all of them are of interest to the discussion of transgender history.

Regarding pronoun use, in the following article, I will mostly be using the English equivalents of the pronouns that are actually used in the ancient sources, which may or may not be the pronouns that the individuals discussed here would have preferred to have been used. Unfortunately, the people I will be discussing in this article who actually existed have all been dead for thousands of years, so it is impossible for us to ask what their preferences are.

No, Ancient Greek Slaves Did Not Like Being Enslaved

It seems like it should be obvious that slaves in ancient Greece did not like being enslaved. Unfortunately, things that seem like they should be obvious are often things that many people don’t find obvious at all. There is a disturbingly widespread claim that slaves in ancient Greece were happy to be enslaved and that they preferred slavery over freedom.

This claim recently received attention among classicists due to a description for a lecture by an esteemed classics professor for The Great Courses Daily, which begins with the shocking assertion “Slavery was the ideal condition for some people in ancient Greece.”

The claim has been around for a very long time, however. It has been widely disseminated through books and other media and, despite the valiant efforts of some classicists to point out that ancient slavery was cruel and unjust, many people continue to regard it as benign or at worst a necessary evil.

Sean Hannity Still Doesn’t Know Latin—But Does He Read My Blog?

Those who have been reading my articles for a while may recall that I published an article on 16 May 2020 titled “Sean Hannity Does Not Know Latin” in which I extensively made fun of Sean Hannity’s book Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, for the fact that the pre-released cover image had the thoroughly garbled and unintelligible Latin motto “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae” emblazoned across the bottom.

In my article, I noted that it was evident that whoever came up with that motto had simply typed the phrase “Live free or America dies” into Google Translate and slapped the garbled nonsense that spewed out straight onto the front cover of the book. (Apparently no one told them that Google Translate is absolutely terrible when it comes to dead languages.)

Now, as it happens, the very book whose Latin motto I criticized is set to be released in two days. Curiously, the unintelligible Latin word salad has vanished from the front cover and been replaced with the grammatically correct motto “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat,” which neatly translates into English to mean, “Let us live free so that America will not die.” This makes me wonder: Did someone at Threshold Editions read my blog post and realize they needed to fix the bad Latin?

Things That Did Not Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire

People have a lot of theories about what caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. In particular, many American conservatives seem to really love talking about the parallels that supposedly exist between the current situation in the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire. Usually, they try to argue that we need to reject liberal ideas and return to good old-fashioned traditional values and that, if we do this, we will be able to save our empire from its impending doom.

Unfortunately, the people who make these comparisons generally know nothing at all about what really caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They basically just impute things they don’t like about our current situation and claim that these things are what led to the Roman Empire’s downfall. (They also invariably seem to forget that only the western portion of the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD; the eastern portion managed to survive for a thousand years after that until the conquest of the city of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.)

Today, I’m going to talk about some things that definitely were not significant factors in the decline of the western Roman Empire, but that people—especially American conservatives—like to pretend were.

Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked

In our society we revere scientists far more than we revere historians. Consequently, people are often more willing to listen to what scientists say about history than what historians say about history. Unfortunately, often times, when scientists try to speak or write about history, they make glaring mistakes.

For instance, I have already written extensively about how the 1980 television miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, written and presented by the astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, promoted all sorts of egregious misconceptions about the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia and about the supposed destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

The book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written by the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker is one that has been bothering me for a long time. I promised that I would write an article about it in this article I wrote last year about violence in the pre-modern world, but I have been holding back until now because I am aware of how popular the book is and what an impact it has had on so many people’s lives.

Bill Gates, for instance, described it in a review as “one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever.” Unfortunately, this book is filled with all kinds of historical inaccuracies and I think it promotes some ideas that, while they may seem comforting in the short-term, are actually deleterious in the long-run.

Religious Freedom in the Islamic World

It is popularly believed that religious freedom does not exist in the Islamic world and that all people in all Islamic countries are strictly forbidden from practicing any religion other than Islam. This is not an entirely correct perception. It is true that, in many Islamic countries, religious freedom is greatly restricted. Nonetheless, religious freedom does exist to varying degrees in different Islamic countries around the world and there are a few Muslim-majority countries in which citizens have complete religious freedom.

The Dark Side of Alexander Hamilton

Today is Independence Day, the day when the United States annually celebrates the approval of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. (The congress had actually voted to declare independence from Britain two days earlier on July 2nd.)

Coinciding with the occasion, yesterday, Disney released a recording of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton on their streaming service Disney+. My family and I watched it together. I had listened to the soundtrack previously, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to actually see the show in any form.

Hamilton accurately captures some of Alexander Hamilton’s more obvious personality faults: his arrogance, his impulsiveness, his temper, his womanizing, and his tactlessness. Unfortunately, the musical glosses over some of his more troubling faults, most notably his authoritarian political leanings. In this article, I want to explore some of the overlooked flaws of the real-life Alexander Hamilton.