Barbarians gonna barbarian

Ancient and Modern Barbarians

Growing up, it was a common trope that cultures that we now associate with poverty, violence, and oppression were once world-leading in promoting prosperity and moral progress as well as the quintessentially human act of inventing. This popular belief was ultimately not driven by an earnest desire to promote awareness of empirically true but neglected facts. Instead, it was supported by anecdotes and quotations of dubious reliability and relevance, by scholarship that has turned out to be exaggerated or fraudulent, and by the promotion of these things in popular media.

My favorite example of this has to do with the invention of many of the inventions credited to the so-called Islamic Golden Age by a rogue Wikipedia editor.

My latest article is about how a rogue Wikipedia editor confabulated and misattributed thousands of inventions and concepts to Muslims

This trolling made its way into blogs, articles, books, and TV programs. You might even believe some of his lies!

Link: https://t.co/4wYDCYPMm3 pic.twitter.com/yFOIaXqrSs

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) October 1, 2026

The article is enlightening and the comments on the X thread are fun:

This post was literally predicted and originally written by Al-Deeznutz in 1431.

- TRUE.

A Saudi tried to convince me today that
Arabs predate Jews in Judaea.

- So a Saudi who couldn't read his own "holy book" . . not even a little bit shocked.

I still think an American kid who didn't speak Scots writing most of the Scots-language Wikipedia articles was the funnier scandal

- There are so many hilarious Wikipedia scandals. I thought about mentioning that one, but I'd mentioned it too recently.

The top responses to this by Muslims so far are:

- Illiterate-tier misreadings of clear sentences

- Claiming the article says things it doesn't

- Doxxing with false information

There are barbarians everywhere!

Oct. 7 coming up

Don't fall for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender"!

This poster should go in virtually every psychology textbook in the section where they explain the abusive strategy of DARVO. https://t.co/pOsna10iJE

— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) October 1, 2026

VDH provides examples of DARVO starting immediately after October 7, 2023 in Genocide Hypocrites. You may be able to think of others.

The Campus Sex Management Industry

The Cornell drama makes me want to shut down all the elite universities. Where are the sensible people in this story? This guy is not sensible. But I wonder if he realizes he is advocating the destruction of his place of employment?

The latest details in "the case" which have caught my attention are that Jane Doe thought that Males #1 and 2 might be gay because of their group sex proposal and she was excited about that; she is suing her sorority for allowing her to get drunk and she is also suing a bar where she stopped for a drink on the way to the frat house. Because she was 20 rather than 21?

Heather MacDonald has written a piece on the campus rape industry and its mythology which is painful to read. Are college campuses really many times more dangerous than downtown Detroit?

Here are a few salient points:

Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marvels at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ‘Let’s get as drunk as we can,’ while the men are hovering over them.” As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.

Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress. These rules presume that an activity originating in inchoate desire, whose nuances have taxed the expressive powers of poets, artists, and philosophers for centuries, can be reduced to a species of commercial code. The process of crafting these rules combines a voyeuristic prurience and a seeming cluelessness about sex. “It is fun,” writes Alan D. Berkowitz, a popular campus rape lecturer and consultant, “to ask students how they know if someone is sexually interested in them.” (Fun for whom? one must ask.) Continues Berkowitz: “Many of the responses rely on guesswork and inference to determine sexual intent.” Such signaling mechanisms, dating from the dawn of the human race, are no longer acceptable on the rape-sensitized campus. “In fact,” explains our consultant, “sexual intent can only be determined by clear and unambiguous communication about what is desired.” So much for seduction and romance; bring in the MBAs and lawyers.

The campus sex-management industry locks in its livelihood by introducing a specious clarity to what is inherently mysterious and an equally specious complexity to what is straightforward. Both the pseudo-clarity and pseudo-complexity work in a woman’s favor, of course. “If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?” asks Berkowitz. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it’s hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent. But perhaps a girl who has just so outfitted her partner will decide after the fact that she has been “raped”—so better to declare the action, as Berkowitz does, “inherently ambiguous.” He recommends instead that colleges require “clear verbal consent” for sex, a policy that the recently disbanded Antioch College introduced in the early 1990s to universal derision.

The university is sneaking back in its in loco parentis oversight of student sexual relations, but it has replaced the moral content of that regulation with supposedly neutral legal procedure. The generation that got rid of parietal rules has re-created a form of bedroom oversight as pervasive as Bentham’s Panopticon.

But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity. . .

Plenty of people have fun and consensual group sex. They don’t typically go to the police afterward. And if what Jane Doe and these men wanted was fun and consensual group sex, they could have arranged that for the next day when they were all sober. But let’s just be honest: Most sober and empowered 20-year-old women don’t want to have sex with more than a half-dozen men in a single night, and I suspect that the men in question knew that Jane Doe was not an enthusiastic participant but someone who had to be pressured and plied.

Who are the "plenty of people" who have "fun and consensual group sex" that no one regrets?

Gay men.

George Michael was still in the closet when he released "I Want Your Sex" in the late 1980's, at the height of the AIDS crisis, an affirmation of sex positivity in the face of a pandemic that spread through sex. The song includes the line "sex is best when it's one on one" -- a stipulation that was puzzling to an audience who, for the most part, hadn't considered the possibility that sex could be other than one on one.

For the straight audience "sex" was a term that referred to an activity that was by default understood to be one on one. Only among gays would an affirmation of sex positivity have to be tempered by an enticement that sex is actually "best when it's one on one." It was also a period when public health authorities were pretending that straight people faced the same risk of AIDS as gay people so as not to portray a disease that overwhelming spread through homosexual anal sex as a "gay disease."

Fast forward to the present, kids socialize less, enter into relationships less, and have less sex than ever before -- but the gangbang has entered their repertoire through pervasive online pornography -- and of course one must acknowledge that "plenty of people have fun and consensual group sex" before noting that actually, women don't want it. For them, sex is best when it's one on one.

Founding Fathers

Daily dose of history, September 27

Samuel Adams was an abject failure as a businessman. After graduating from Harvard with two degrees, his father gave him the money with which to launch his business career. Sam soon lost it all. He was 26 when his father died, leaving him a substantial inheritance. But by the time Samuel reached middle age most of the money was gone and he was barely able to support his wife and two children. He was well on his way to being someone history would not remember. But in 1764, at age 42, Samuel Adams gave up any further pretense of being a businessman and devoted himself to his true calling—politics.

An ardent proponent of the rights of the colonists since his college days, and a strident admirer of the writings of John Locke, Adams was a brilliant political organizer and a stirring public speaker—seemingly a natural-born revolutionary. He emerged as a leader of the resistance to taxation without representation. To the Patriots he was an inspiring motivator. To the Tories he was a provocative rabblerouser. Adams played key roles in the events leading to both the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. He founded the Sons of Liberty. He conceived the idea of Committees of Correspondence. He organized and championed the boycott of British goods. And he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress. Thomas Jefferson would later call him, “truly the man of the Revolution.”

After retiring from Congress, Samuel Adams served as governor of his beloved Massachusetts, before dying peacefully on October 2, 1803, at age 81.
Samuel Adams was born on September 27, 1722, three hundred four years ago today.

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Weekend

The Week In Pictures: Oops, They Did It Again Edition

It was another busy week in the news, although much of it had a deja vu feel. Another Muslim terrorist tried to crash an airplane, but fortunately the plane was full of Israelis and there were spare pilots on board. In the U.K., meanwhile, five “British men” were discovered by a passerby, apparently in the act of perpetrating or planning to perpetrate a terrorist attack on a U.K. air base.

Sydney Sweeney was criticized – again! – for an ad in which she looks too good. Or that is what feminists think, anyway. (Speaking of Sweeney, I have no idea whether she is a conservative or not, but she is smart enough to be one. Sydney’s ad quadrupled the value of her client to $2 billion, and she took equity in the company as her fee.) And, in an original if macabre story, Tennessee’s all-female execution team bungled the long-overdue execution of a murderer. And once again, the upcoming midterms look large in the minds of meme-makers.

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, Okay, how do we get the kids to understand WHY things are so weird?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.