Tea at Trianon: We Awoke and Were Angels

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

We Awoke and Were Angels

From Crisis:

It becomes hard to ignore the dissonance which then arises when essential value is ascribed to such accidents of embodied human life as race. We are told that real distinctions obtain on the level of race, distinctions which do not admit of gender’s celebrated fluidity. More still, racial distinctions bear with them qualitative moral distinctions. To be of a certain skin color is ineluctably to participate in a structural dialectic with definite ethical implications. Thus, we speak of brown bodies and white bodies as players in a supremacist power dynamic, phenotypically relegated to a role in a hopeless drama.

In such a dialectic, we seem to be thrown back upon an essentialist viewpoint, one in which existence is deeply conditioned by essence. Yet the dialectical movement goes a step further into what may be a deeper, more insidious angelism than that which the Sartrean view entails. For those who speak or act in violation of the structural moral code, damnation is swift and of course eternal.

Those, for instance, whose remarks on Twitter or Facebook have once been deemed racist, sexist, transphobic, and so on, are themselves in perpetuity racist, sexist, or transphobic. Whatever personal enlightenment they later achieve, whatever act of atonement they in time perform, avails nothing. They have gainsaid the Gospel of Wokeness, and their tongues must be cut out. (Read more.)

Also from Crisis:

The Left is currently in full meltdown-mode over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Its days of controlling what can and cannot be said on one of the world’s largest social media platforms appears to be ending. Blue check liberals are now threatening to leave Twitter, much like many conservatives left the social media giant after it increased its level of censorship in the wake of January 6th.

When conservatives flocked to Gab and Parler back then, many liberals complained that those outlets were just echo chambers that didn’t give all sides of an issue (their irony meter apparently being broken). Now, however, with Musk promising to make Twitter more open to what the Left considers unacceptable speech, liberals are looking for a safer space in which to vent.

Enter counter.social, which advertises “No trolls. No abuse. No ads. No fake-news. No foreign influence operations.” They have “zero tolerance” for any “fake news,” ban anyone coming from unacceptable countries (such as Russia), and will not allow any counter-narrative speech.

I decided to give Counter Social a try, just to see how serious they were about controlling speech. (Read more.)