Cordoba: One House, Two Religions

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Originally constructed in 784, over a demolished Visigothic church, the Mosque is one of the oldest in the world. Cordoba at the time was part of a Muslim Empire. Spanish Christians re-took Cordoba in 1236. Rather than demolish the place, the Spanish decided to convert it to Christian worship. In some people’s eyes, supposedly including those of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, it’s an unholy mess. To my eyes it’s beautiful.

Throughout history, most people spend most of the time getting on well with each other. In her book A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman made an important point:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening — on a lucky day — without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

We know the history of religion and relations between Christianity and Islam as one of unmitigated disaster, cruelty, horror and intolerance. In fact, these moments are few and far between. Most people spend most of their time muddling along. Unfortunately, all it really takes is one bad moment to rob us of an invaluable monument like the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. Think of ISIS for example. In just two years, they have destroyed physical heritage going back millennia across a wide swathe of Mesopotamia. Jokers like that only emerge every couple centuries, but when they do, the potential for destruction is immense. We’re incredibly lucky that Cordoba’s monument has survived as long as it has. Spain has had it’s fair share of religious thugs. We’re lucky. The building has many lessons to teach. The video above lays out one or two.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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YouTube Hates Women

This week I go ahead and punch a gift horse in the mouth and raise some questions about the outsize performance of my last video. It’s my second fastest video to 1,000 views ever, and I question the reasons behind that. I’ve easily done 20 times as many videos singling out male politicians for ridicule. But my two videos criticizing female politicians do better than all of those videos combined. The channel goes where the channel goes, but I’ll definitely put more thought into why it is that I’m going after someone in the future.

I mentioned one caveat. Victoria Nuland is a figure I’ve been thinking of doing a video about for quite some time. She is the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs. Depending on who you ask, she may have been the main driving force behind the disaster in Ukraine in 2014. I’m pretty sure I don’t buy that, as I think the break with Russia was baked into the whole dumb arc of US policy in Eastern Europe since 1992 or so. More research needs to be done. What I am more confident of is that she occupies a weird space at the neocon nexus of the Republican and Democratic parties in Washington, DC. She worked for Dick Cheney, and now she’s helping to run Obama’s Europe policy. I think a video on her career and connections would do a good job of illustrating the point that individual presidents don’t really have all that much to do with the agenda that Washington, DC pursues. Presidents can nudge, but they don’t really steer.

But the more I think about it, why am I even aware of Victoria Nuland? Is it because she’s a woman in power? She’s definitely not the only politician in DC who is more loyal to the Military Industrial Complex than a particular party (actually that’s all of them). She’s probably not the only one married to a self-parodying Neocon pundit either. The only reason I’m aware of her is the fact that folks have gravitated toward her particular scandals and biography. I wonder why that is. Food for thought. Anyway, if she gets up to further hijinks under Trump, I wanted to give myself a pass to mention her.

Something else worth mentioning is the fact that 80% of my audience is male. That’s always been deeply annoying to me. I’ve tried some more explicitly feminist content in the past, but it hasn’t solved the problem. If you’re wondering whether I’m hoping that this video will help me out with that… Of course I am! Also, if I’m going to make a sweeping comment about the behavior of the YouTube audience, I should probably point out that my audience is currently heavily weighted towards dudes who like talking about politics and history. Which is perhaps not all that surprising.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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How Samantha Power Killed Aleppo | Syria 9

Russia and China have never made a secret of it. They are more interested in sovereignty than human rights. Considering the way that the US has weaponized human rights concerns recently, it’s hard to blame them. But as we watch the brutalization of East Aleppo, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power’s cries of “Shame!” make a lot of sense. IF you ignore one of those very important things that nobody talks about. This video takes you back to 2011, and the US decision that made The UN’s impotence in Aleppo inevitable.

A certain UN resolution is pretty central to this video. Here it is if you’d like to review it.

Yeesh. This one is heavy. I was lamenting recently that my videos weren’t using clever editing, and didn’t have much emotional range. Coming across the Ambassador’s speech allowed me to deal with both of those issues. I really like the result, I hope you do to.

Lest you think I’m being unfair to Ambassador Power, a bit of explanation is in order. Power was initially famous for writing a book called The Problem From Hell: America In the Age of Genocide. She’s also famous for only seeing America as the solution to problems, and not making much allowance for the downsides of intervention. So far, so average. If I’d read the book, maybe I’d have a stronger opinion, but on that alone I’d be happy to see her make a speech like this. But she’s also been involved in the decision making on Syria from the get-go. She was an adviser to Obama when he was a Senator, and she was on the National Security Council before starting at the UN in 2013. So she was in on the ground floor with both Libya and Syria, and she’s had a hand on the meat grinder this whole time. She’s used her reputation as an international do-gooder to help destroy both of these countries. She’s not alone in that, but she’s the one using this particularly horrific moment to preach from pretended moral high ground. So no, I don’t think I’m being particularly unfair to her.

The topic of this video has bugged me for a while. It strikes me as one of the central blunders of the Obama administration, but nobody talks about it. I thought diplomacy was about being able to see things from the other guy’s perspective. This is right up there with NATO expansion as failures of understanding go…

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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Taiwan: An Argument With Myself…

Taiwan is something we don’t talk about too much. In fact, that’s pretty much US policy, and one of the rare ones I agree with. It’s possible to see the question from the Chinese position, and from the Taiwanese position as well. In this video I do both. Please watch the video all the way through. It starts out forcefully arguing the Chinese position, then it forcefully argues the Taiwanese position. I happen to believe both things. Which is very confusing. It makes my head hurt a bit. I look forward to the comments section on this one. Maybe it’ll change my mind?

As confusing as Taiwan can be, it’s vital that we all learn more about it. It’s central to one of the more pressing issues of the Trump Presidency and the coming decades…

Also I love that my research for this video involved unearthing my once treasured collection of He-man figures. It provides an interesting window on manufacturing in the early to mid 1980s. I thought that they had all been “Made In Taiwan” but that wasn’t the case. The figures I had were manufactured in Mexico, Taiwan and Malaysia. Interestingly the most recent, and most complex figures, ca. 1985, were manufactured in Malaysia. Perhaps Taiwan was already moving on by that point. The later complexity may be down to the fact that Mattel had more money to dedicate to the line, after it had proved insanely popular. I also found a Thundercat figure, but Mumm-Ra will have to wait for another video.

Wow I need to get out of my mom and dad’s house. Want to help?

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3 Keys To Managing President Trump

We keep hearing about how Trump is “Not Normal”. That’s true, but it’s not where we should be focusing our energies. Shouting that repeatedly into the echo chamber is a sort of paralysis. What we need to do now is focus on ways to manage Donald Trump, and handle his not normal presidency. The most direct bit of action I suggest is subscribing to a newspaper, physically or on-line. I subscribed to the Washington Post, but there are hundreds of options across the United States, and even abroad. They all need our support, and we need them. The outlets below are all anti-Trump to some degree, or at least will spend time trying to see beyond Trump’s tweets to what he’s actually doing to our government.

“Right-Wing” Marketing Segment:

The Wall Street Journal

The National Review

Reason Magazine

“Left-Wing” Marketing Segment:

The Washington Post

I don’t consider myself to be part of the “Left-Wing” marketing segment, but I subscribed to the Washington Post because they fought Donald Trump in the past election a lot more effectively than the Democratic Party did.

The New York Times

The Guardian

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What Does the More Freedom Foundation Do Now?

Donald Trump really does change everything. I’ve been making videos full time for almost three years now. As you can probably gather if you’ve read my essay advocating for third parties, I had a plan going to the 2016 election. My bone-deep loathing for Trump changed all that. But it’s changed more than that. Starting out, my attitude towards the world and the US government in particular was pretty antagonistic. Now I’m pretty convinced that the world, and the US government need to be saved from themselves. This has led to some reformatting of the mission of this whole thing. I’ve laid it out in this video, and in some changes to the website you can see here. There’s more to come!

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Video Transcript below…

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