This girl lives in Bonkle
I kid you not. it isa place in Scotland
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Welsh Council Rewrites History To Turn King Arthur Into An LGBT Icon
First, they came for Abraham Lincoln. Now, the Alphabet Mafia is trying to make King Arthur into a gay icon. Slay, King?
Thankfully, at least this one isn’t in America.
A Welsh Council recently included the 5th Century Welsh ruler in their “LGBTQ+ timeline,” British media reported. The move is part of an “Action Plan” to raise “awareness and understanding” of the alphabet community that also teaches LGBT history in local libraries, museums and archives.
But the basis of King Arthur’s inclusion is even more ridiculous than Lincoln’s. The nasty documentary that came out about Lincoln in September at least had a well-documented history of the former president’s close male friendships to point to. Yet King Arthur is said to be gay now because he once “wore women’s clothing,” maybe.
Obviously, this is insane. King Arthur wasn’t a drag queen — a concept and identity that didn’t exist until the very recent past. By this standard, you could call countless generations of men in Europe and America gay. “Drag” was the norm among men historically because women couldn’t entertain outside of brothels. Watch the 90s hit “Shakespeare in Love” if you need a refresher on who played the female roles in medieval England.
Like the Lincoln documentary, the goal is always to rewrite history. King Arthur united his people to fight off foreign invaders, searched for the Holy Grail, established his court at Camelot and, as the legend goes, vanquished the monsters and magic that would destroy his kingdom. King Arthur is as close a figure the Welsh people have to Lincoln in their history, a man whose heroic deeds crystallized into legend and shaped the Welsh identity.
The point of this exercise is to mainline “gay identity” even further into the mainstream psyche, “proving” that the spectrum of LGBT insanity isn’t just some new fad, social contagion or life choice, but the permanent way of the world. With this, the left aims to form a new generation in the mold of LGBT ideology. Perhaps more importantly, they want you to subordinate all the pride you have in your country’s history to the new religion of queerness.
These gender monsters today are even scarier than they were in Arthur’s day. Will the Welsh people once again rise to vanquish them?
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/welsh-council-rewrite-history-king-arthur-lgbt/
********************************************************Red State Universities Purge Gen Ed Courses Following Order To Step Away From ‘Woke Ideologies’
Florida’s public universities are purging general education courses that include “woke ideologies,” following a state law enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Politico reported Monday.
Hundreds of courses previously required for graduation will now either be offered as electives or removed, following a GOP-led 2023 law that forced universities to review required courses to avoid “identity politics,” Politico reported. The once-required courses that are being changed to electives or cut include sociology classes and “gender studies,” following the state law targeting “woke ideologies.”
“Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, Florida refocused its higher education system on the classical mission of universities: pursuing truth and preparing students to be citizens of this republic,” Julia Friedman, deputy press secretary for DeSantis, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Courses on ‘Humanities Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality[sic]’ and ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion’ do not fulfill the mission of higher education.”
Republicans in Florida passed the higher education law in 2023, which specified that general education college courses were to not warp major historical events or teach a curriculum proposing “identity politics,” according to Politico. However, Democrats fought against the bill, claiming that the Florida Board of Governors was making the state’s higher education political and that the Board has too much power.
“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” Katie Blankenship, leader of a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America, told Politico.
“If their subject matter is prohibited by statute but is compelling, then students are going to elect to take it,” university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in an interview, according to Politico. “But what is not going to happen in Florida — the students are not going to be forced to take courses that have these prohibited concepts in order to fulfill their general education requirements.”
Florida’s Board of Governors along with the different schools looked at removing any courses that were “too narrowly focused,” making it difficult to be considered a “general” education class, Rodrigues told Politico.
The Board of Governors removed sociology, which was replaced with a history class, Politico reported. The University of Florida is one university changing core courses in compliance to the law, Politico reported. The University of Florida proposed removing some gender studies-related courses like “Humanities Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality” and “Social Geography.” (RELATED: Gov. DeSantis Signs Law Requiring Schools To Teach ‘Evils Of Communism’)
Higher education institutions that defy the Board of Governor’s requests, keeping certain core courses against recommendations, can potentially risk losing serious funding from the state, according to Politico. However, some universities like Florida Gulf Coast University have welcomed the new changes.
“An infringement on academic freedom would be to say this course can’t be offered at the university,” Rodrigues told Politico. “No one has said that in any of these scenarios. What we are saying is, we define what is general education. We define that based upon what the state statutes have laid out and we’re being compliant with that. And I think the courts have held that what gets designated as general education curriculum is up to the legislature who funds it.”
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Former UK schools minister: Reforms needed to change ‘hearts and minds’ of teachers
One of Britain’s longest-serving education ministers, who introduced phonics nationally into the English school system, said the extensive decade-long reforms that rejected “progressivist” ideologies required not just a change to the curriculum but also changes to “the hearts and minds of a whole profession”.
Ex-Tory minister Nick Gibb said the “movement of teachers” since the reforms began in 2010 had come a long way but was still a “work in progress”. Teaching phonics – helping children learn to read by sounding out the letters of words – was only the baseline.
“The evidence is so overwhelming that phonics in the teaching of reading is the most effective way. And this debate has gone to Australia, it’s gone to America, it’s gone to New Zealand, they’re all now moving step by step towards phonics,” the minister of state for schools and education from 2014 to 2023 said ahead of the Australian School Improvement Summit in Melbourne on Thursday.
“Although we have introduced phonics, and every school is teaching phonics to children, that’s the starting point for reading. It’s a necessary condition for reading; you have to be able to decode words but you also need to develop a love of reading for pleasure as well … so there’s more work to do there.”
England was ranked fourth in the 2022 international literacy rankings. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment, Australia scored higher than the UK in reading but on par in maths.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has made an extra $16bn in funding for public schools in each state and territory over the next decade conditional upon the introduction of evidence-based teaching reforms, such as phonics-based reading methods, and explicit instruction techniques. Western Australia, Tasmania and the NT have signed on. Public schools in South Australia, NSW and WA have already adopted phonics and explicit instruction.
Progressive ideology, inquiry-based learning that sets tasks for students to discover facts and skills using their own initiative, failed the most vulnerable in society, Mr Gibb said, warning that it still persisted today.
“What we had to do wasn’t just put more money here, or close this, or open that. We had to change the whole Zeitgeist, the whole philosophy of education that had dominated our education system in England for decades,” he said.
“And that was the challenge. We set out to change the whole way the education sector – 450,000 teachers – thought about education, and the teacher training that goes into that as well.
“But we had evidence on our side … the evidence was so compelling that progressivist education was damaging the life chances of the most disadvantaged … (they) really did suffer from this ideological approach.”
Mr Gibb said while it was “not finished”, the conservative government reforms had started a movement. “There is a big movement of teachers in England who strongly believe in what we believe in … We’ve unleashed the profession to take control of their own thinking, their own pedagogy and curriculum.”
Mr Gibb said his government also changed the curriculum to be much more “knowledge based”.
“There are people whose whole careers are based on the idea that you don’t need to teach knowledge because they can look it up … and this view still prevails particularly with Google and AI.”
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Colonial history and the past’s new moral reckoning
A relentless feature of public debate is the demonisation of the past – from denigration of the British Empire to the discrediting of Australia’s past as a project in colonialism, racism and violence – a lens used to argue for the nation’s guilt and the case for restitution.
History is now seminal to the cultural and strategic challenges facing the West. The goal of Marxist, anti-colonial and progressive analysts is to achieve historical justice for victimised minorities by demonstrating the moral failure, past and present, of Western nations.
It is because much historiography is motivated by the politics of the present that it is filled with factual misrepresentation and ideological bias. One of the most prominent authors of the salutary corrective is Nigel Biggar, Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, whose 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, is an exercise in audacity – a moral judgment on the British Empire and on colonialism generally.
Biggar, an ethicist with a vast grasp of history, is about to visit Australia for a series of speaking engagements. His book covering four centuries of the British Empire from 1550 constitutes a direct challenge to the anti-colonialists and their gospel that colonialism is solely a story of profits, killing and invasion.
Sound familiar?
His scholarship is based not on a defence of empire as such but on a balanced, accurate and fairer reading of history. His targets are unscrupulous history and distorted morality.
“On the colonial front, the politically driven, unhistorical, wholesale denigration of the British Empire not only trashes the record of the West but corrodes faith in it,” Biggar says. Indeed, that is its entire point.
Protesters march in Adelaide in solidarity with protests in the United States following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. Picture: Getty Images
Protesters march in Adelaide in solidarity with protests in the United States following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. Picture: Getty Images
He provides a long list of the “evils” of British colonialism but then provides a long list of its beneficial legacies. He says advocates claiming the evil outweighs the good cannot mount a persuasive case because the bad and the good are so different that they are “incommensurable”. Biggar asks: How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace?
He knows the stakes are high – nothing less than the moral foundations of our current society. Do we have a civilisation worth supporting or are we doomed to perpetual self-loathing because of irremediable moral flaws? Biggar said the judgment of history goes to “the very integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of the West”, and “that is why I have written this book”.
The issue of slavery is central to the debate. Campaigners from Black Lives Matter to Rhodes Must Fall say white Britons in the third decade of the 21st century are possessed by an anti-black racism derived from the early 18th-century racist slavery.
How valid is this widely accepted proposition?
Biggar says slavery was varied, ancient and universal. It existed in every ancient Mesopotamian civilisation starting with Egypt in the third millennium BC followed by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Chinese, the Incas and Aztecs, and was practised after Muhammad throughout the Islamic world until around 1920, with the Muslim slave trade out of Africa far exceeding that of European powers across the Atlantic. It was rife in Africa long before European colonisation.
The British were estimated to have shipped 3.3 million slaves from Africa between 1660 and 1807, second behind the Portuguese. After a campaign run by Christian leaders, the efforts of William Wilberforce and agitation inside and outside parliament, the slave trade was abolished in 1807, and in 1834 slaves across the British Empire were formally emancipated.
These events were merely the start of one of the most intense international humanitarian campaigns in history. Partly driven by abolitionist demands in Britain post-1807, Biggar said the imperial government adopted “a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide”. This involved the creation of a new slave trade department in the Foreign Office to pursue the abolition, Britain’s unsuccessful diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna to secure an abolition treaty with all major European powers, and deployment of Royal Navy ships off the west coast of Africa to disrupt the export of slaves, with the number of ships seldom below 20 during the 1844-65 period and at its height this represented 13 per cent of the navy’s resources
The fleet engaged in confrontation with Brazil, authorised by the parliament, trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships after which the British attacked Lagos to destroy its slave facilities. Lord Palmerston, twice PM, said the achievement that gave him the greatest pleasure was “forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade”.
Biggar said the “humanitarian motive” to suppress slavery was a “common reason” for British imperialism in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Meanwhile in Asia, Sir Stamford Raffles abolished the import of slaves on the island of Penang and then in Java.
Biggar quotes estimates made of the cost of the British suppression campaign on land and sea worldwide over a century and a half, one conclusion being that “the 19th-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the 18th-century benefits”. He references the work of Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, who evaluate the total economic cost and conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone was “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history”.
Biggar said the British could not undo the evil of the slave trade but they did the next best thing: they repented of it and liberated the living. But only one side of the history is told today and, to a large extent, that is because the motive is to drive contemporary politics by a misleading historical narrative. The lesson: the only justification for truth-telling is being truthful.
“For the second half of its life, anti-slavery, not slavery, was at the heart of imperial policy,” Biggar wrote. “The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.”
Yet this is a contentious view because the near exclusively hostile story of Western history holds sway in the media, academia and schools.
Biggar confronts the moral arguments for compensation and reparations for past racism and slavery. Claims to compensation must show continuing loss or harm from past injury, not an easy task over hundreds of years. The 21st-century descendants of these cruelties find their lives owing much to events in the 200 years since their emancipation.
He asks: Can we be sure people would have been better off had their ancestors remained in West Africa? A similar question could be posed in Australia: Can we be sure Indigenous people would have been better off if the British colonisation of Australia had never occurred?
Biggar recounts a conversation between a British diplomat and one of Nigeria’s rulers. The Nigerian was pressing the cause for compensation after Britain’s colonial rule. The diplomat replied: “I entirely agree. And you shall have your compensation – just as soon as we get ours from the Romans.”
As Biggar said, colonisation and empire was the standard form of political organisation for the last 4000 years to 1945. It extended through the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Ottomans and the Dutch, French and English, among others. Most empires had a positive as well as a negative dimension, though many current histories discount this.
Australia is lucky – its colonialisation by the British meant a generation of British liberals believing in the rights of man and repudiating slavery laid the political foundations for what became one of the world’s early and entrenched democracies. Australia’s colonial experience, reflecting Biggar’s thesis, is a mixture of the good and the bad. We need to hold both truths in our mind and not succumb to polemical narratives of either the all-good or all-bad history.
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