European countries whose constitutions contain explicit references to culture, identity, language, ethnos, or nationhood that unambiguously or arguably establish it as a state for, or centered on, or indelibly connected to a particular people, i.e. an "ethnostate" Most ex-communist countries have this. Croatia is a typical example: A preamble recapitulating the history of the nation, language establishing it as a nation state for the nation's titular people, and sometimes explicit enumeration of historic national minorities.

Countries that had no awareness, understanding, or appreciation of entire eras of their ancient history have no greater of a moral claim on artifacts from those eras than the Europeans who discovered, studied, translated, and reconstructed them, often for the first time ever.

https://twitter.com/978_autumn/status/1868526149808361802

Rather than the Benin bronzes, which were literally looted, an example of artifacts which should *never* be returned are the Assyrian reliefs at the British Museum—legally acquired at a time when no one else knew of or cared about their existence, and in real danger if returned.

This is like saying "Lincoln Cathedral is older than the Ming Dynasty." A vacuous triviality that only sounds revelatory if you don't know anything about Mesoamerican history. The Aztecs were not ancient; they were a very "modern" state that hearkened back to ancient forebears.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1865829822523691059

I enjoy Crémieux's content, but almost everything in that thread is just bait for ignorant RW accounts to gloat about history. Harvard is older than Hasidic Judaism? Wow, I'm just hearing this now. Next you'll tell me that the College of William & Mary is older than Methodism.

Deserving of a more thorough discussion, but:
- Yom Kippur is not about kapparot
- A substantial number of Orthodox Jews have always rejected kapparot
- Kapparot is not supposed to be a sacrifice
- You are not supposed to believe your sins are literally transferred to the chicken

https://twitter.com/psyop4921/status/1852406263528751476

It's supposed to be a charitable act in which a chicken or money is given to the poor, with the idea of the offering as a "substitute" being a purely symbolic reflection on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Nonetheless, many rabbis have historically rejected it as a superstition.

There are lots of comparisons to make between the systems established after the Spanish and Islamic conquests, but I think what made the Islamic system different—and in my opinion, worse—was the abjection and oppression of the supposedly "protected" dhimmi communities. Obviously with variation across time and place, but across the sweep of history the dhimma system contrived to subject those who resisted or deferred conversion to Islam to humiliation, ruin, and ever-further diminishment.

In Greece's defense, this was a mutual ethnic cleansing with Turkey brokered by international powers at the Lausanne Conference—Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, decided that population exchange was the only viable solution.

https://twitter.com/RichardHannay17/status/1847419955244896731

My understanding is that if the 1947 Palestine partition plan had been carried out, there would have been internationally-sanctioned relocation of Arabs from the Jewish state to the Arab state. But the flight and expulsion that actually happened was far more violent and lawless.

An interesting thing is that the "reification" of writing over spoken language exaggerates the discontinuity between Old English and Middle/Modern English. Everyone in England spoke the same language the day after Hastings as before—

https://twitter.com/DSA_Arrakis/status/1846960721176723832

—and there's no evidence that language change proceeded at an unusual pace after the Norman conquest. Nobody on the ground would have noticed their language "becoming Middle English", even with a steady and increasing adoption of French and Latin loanwords.

Particularly unconvincing is the argument that "Some notion of 'nation' existed in the past, but because people often prioritized regional, local, or religious identities before it, that means it was completely and totally different from what we call 'nations' today." Because, well, firstly... That's still true today! Nation ("country") *still* isn't the most important identity to many people in modern nation-states, even if you limit your consideration to geographically-based identities!

I'm told that pre-modern notions of nation were nothing like modern nations. But Anthony Kaldellis says the medieval Romans were a nation and considered their politeia the national state of the Roman people—so put that in your "consensus of all serious scholarship" and smoke it. According to Anthony Kaldellis, the medieval Romans conceived of themselves as a nation and an ethnos, marked by distinctive speech, ancestry, dress, cuisine, and habits, as well as their own religion, even if it was one they shared with some other peoples.

The analogy between biological and linguistic evolution is far from perfect, and I think one thing that trips people up is that, while some biological phyla remain relatively "the same" for extremely long periods of time, this doesn't really happen with languages. So I think when some people ask whether one language is "older" than another, they are expecting something like insects, which have existed in more or less recognizable form for at least 300 million years, vs. mammals, of much more recent origin.

The social mingling of men and women—including mixed dancing—is a cornerstone of Western culture, dating back to the customs of the early Germanic peoples, and a key part of what differentiates us from Islam and the East with their culturally stifling sex segregation.

https://twitter.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1837665892483919998

Social mingling of men and women gave us courtly love, the Enlightenment salon, great literature like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the occasions for which perhaps the majority of all classical music was written, from Lully's tragédies en musique to the waltzes of Strauss.

A major contributor to the lack of trust in the immigration system in both Europe and the US is the deliberate obfuscation of legal vs. illegal and refugee vs. non-refugee status, which, very conveniently, makes it almost impossible to discuss the issue in accurate terms. The Haitians in Springfield have Temporary Protected Status, which is not the same as asylum. It is literally temporary in nature. But the Haitians are obviously not there "temporarily"—they are there to revitalize the town and a Democratic admin won't be sending them back.

Truly a naïve and Western-brained view to assume that a typical Palestinian or other Arab would recognize the resistance against the Zionists as having anything to do with something they consider a shame and a humiliation—a corrupting deviance exploited by the Jews, even. They're assuming that all "oppressed people" are primed to accept "the unity of all oppressions", gay and trans rights, etc, but there's just some extraneous thing called "bigotry"—almost a literal physical object—causing a blockage in their brains keeping it from coming together

Exciting news from 2020. Apparently a compelling account of the origin of the templatic morphology of the Afro-Asiatic languages (which include Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber, among others) has been out for a while. Looking forward to digging into this. Wilson takes note of the sporadic claims that Coptic survived as a spoken language in certain pockets of Upper Egypt into the 19th or 20th centuries or even the present day. He says he is "agnostic" on these claims, but to me it is obvious that they are completely apocryphal.

Imagining an honest, genuinely inquisitive move to link the medieval to the "diverse" in historical linguistics—e.g. a study that examines to what degree British and American dialects preserve the morphological distinction between Old English -ing vs.-ende (today's -ing vs. -in) A redundant exercise, because linguistics is already inherently "diverse" in that it involves the study of difference and demands that you analyze human phenomena on their own terms—but nonetheless, wondering what it would mean if calls for "diversity" were made in good faith

Something that slightly bothers me is how the adjective "High" in language names is often misunderstood—and often used, in the names of fictional languages—to mean "high class", "high status", "refined", etc. This originates from two different places. The traditional dialect continuum of continental Germanic is divided into Low, Middle, and High German—a terminology that refers to elevation, like Upper and Lower Egypt. Low German is spoken on the plains by the North Sea and Baltic.

Jfc. 166k likes for a blisteringly awful misrepresentation of history. Medieval cathedrals and other buildings were quite famously built by free, paid, skilled craftsmen belonging to guilds, which were something vaguely akin to modern-day unions.

https://twitter.com/4eo/status/1825712470750646779

Also more likely than not the tweet is just inspired by dumb Monty Python "hitting boards on head" depictions of a miserable Middle Ages, but to be more cynical I feel like it's kind of selling a "We built these streets!" third worldist "African slaves in medieval Europe" message

What's more, when we were discussing how few Indians and Asians were in the area, I mentioned the lack of a local Jewish community—and he admitted he had no idea if or how Jews and Christians were different, and that most people in India had no idea, either.

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1816995981692448834

I explained that the main difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews don't worship Jesus—which I know is a terribly reductive way to put it, but if you're navigating American society and want to avoid a religious faux pas, it's probably the first thing you ought to know.

Thomistic Cowboy
Thomistic Minuteman
Thomist on Bunker Hill
Thomistic Pilgrim
Thomistic Frontiersman
Thomistic Jacksonian
Marian Goodwife
Thomistic Annie Oakley

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1807943797776461831

Basically all of the charm and American-ness of American Catholicism lies in how it's defined by old-time aristocratic colonial cultures or intensely prole-coded immigrant cultures

Lmao. Someone on Reddit wanted the /r/askhistorians take on my Middle East thread.

They assume that I am a "Western Supremacist" because, uh...? Very much "Your claims are false because you are X, and you are X because you made those claims" I don't think I ever said that the people of Islamic Egypt or Mesopotamia didn't think of themselves as the *physical descendants* of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. I mean, maybe they did, maybe they didn't—I'm not informed on that.

Also, public service announcement: Please stop using "Bantu" as a synonym for "black African." It makes you sound like an idiot with a degree in race science from Twitter university. I'm really sorry to everyone involved but it is simply the case that linguistic categories are not isomorphic with genetic categories.