28 thoughts on “If the Battle of Waterloo was Won on the Playing Fields of Eton…”

  2. I have watched the video. Its funny but I am amused by so much these days. Boris is an old Eatonian and well versed in Eaton speak, and he is often very funny as well. He is also what I call an intelligent idiot, a category with so many occupants these days.

    Britain will suffer a lot from what he is doing now, with Brexit. He will very probably roll over at the last minute as its suicide for British business if he goes through with No Deal. As well America will have nothing to do with him, as he will have broken Good Friday. He is smart, but does dumb things all the damn time.

  3. Eton, like Harvard, positions itself as the definer of who is in the ruling class of their respective countries.
    The barbarians have seized power.
    Once the cultural heights have been taken, is there an example in history of them being taken back? If the previous regime was strong enough, they never would have been lost.
    Here is a pitiful example of how hopeless the situation is:
    “Losing this case would be a crushing blow not only to him and his family but to the British tradition of ideological tolerance and viewpoint diversity which institutions like Eton are supposed to uphold.”
    It can’t even be said now that he is right, and should be supported, and his opponents crushed. Just a feeble plea for “tolerance” of what he has to say.
    Pathetic.

  4. well prince harry, cameron and boris, boris is the less foolish, but still enamored of great reset (i’ve linked schwab’s video before ) i’d rather take a dulwich man, like farage, twice on tuesday,

  5. The simple truth is that there is no longer freedom of speech, thought or conscience in the English speaking world outside of the U.S. And it would be gone here if a great many people had their way. Of course, it never existed at all in the rest of the world in any meaningful way.

    This is just another example of how, if the wall is breached, no one will ever be safe at any time because the standard will be whatever whoever seeks to bring charges thinks it should be.

    The chilling statement for an Englishman is that the school was “advised” by specialist lawyers that the video was a breach of at least two laws. What this means is that anything that a person has said can be used to bring charges at some future time. There will be no way to show the these nebulous norms allowed it at the time. Anything recorded is bound to offend someone some day.

    There will be groups that are immune from charges at the same time that they are granted infallibility in making charges. It will be especially amusing, from a safe distance, to watch the contortions when one infallible group brings charges against a member of a different one.

    It’s sad to see the end of a free country, not from war but from suicide.

  6. The battle is not over…there seems to be a lot of pushback–from students, from other teachers, from alumni/donors.

    The outcome of this battle may be more important for the future of Britain than was the battle of Waterloo.

  7. Ah, but the battle is truly lost in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The government is who decides what may be said. The article made clear that the administrators were making their decision on the basis of the law, not their own notions. In practice, exactly the same as China, Russia or Germany, both under Hitler and Merkel.

    The only question is whether or not the government would choose to enforce their judgement against one of their own. I’m sure the lawyers couched their advice in the form that they felt the video was a violation of the law, not on whether the government would choose to enforce it in this case. Since Knowland is presumably Caucasian, affiliated with Eaton rather than a Mosque somewhere, I’d not care to bet on Knowland. The push back may be enough to hold the minions of the law in abeyance in this case and for now. The principal remains: It’s the government that decides what speech and ideas are lawful.

    This is the difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world. There, the frog is truly boiled and most of the citizens don’t realize it’s even happened until the knock on the door, when they find out that they aren’t a member of one of the immune groups.

  8. A few years ago They wanted to change the Los Angeles seal to remove an image of a mission, so They said that someone might sue them, so it was a prudent and money-saving move to change it. I believe They had some activist lined up to actually file a suit if it was deemed necessary. Same scam here. I’m sure it’s 100% true that there is a law that this lecture would violate, but it’s all an inside job by the barbarians to obliterate history and culture.

    I assume many folks have seen this tweet juxtaposing New Yorker covers from now and from 1957? The older one is like from an entire different universe. It is tragic and infuriating what They have done to our culture in the past few generations.

  9. “Ah, but the battle is truly lost in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.”

    Yup we have hate speech laws. We make that illegal, as its a form of assault. YMMV.

  11. “What you have is blasphemy laws. It’s always best to be honest.”

    You will have to explain this one, as I have no idea what you are talking about. ;)

  13. Hate speech laws are just blasphemy laws for Wokism. They criminalize speech that is against the preferred religion.

  14. Not in Canada. While Christianity is the largest religious group in Canada, we have no official religion. Our laws on speech predate woke by a long time as well. As I said we criminalize assault and the speech we criminalize, is regarded as assault.

    I understand you are upset, but words have actual meanings, so making up your own meanings is fine, but pretty flaky. ;)

  15. You have just modified your blasphemy laws to allow hate towards Christianity but to prevent it towards homosexuals, transgenders, etc.

  16. “You have just modified your blasphemy laws to allow hate towards Christianity but to prevent it towards homosexuals, transgenders, etc.”

    Fascinating. So you advocate hate for transgender and homosexual people? Exactly why we have the laws we do, people like you.

  17. LOL. I’m American, I advocate free speech.
    Take the average statement you post here about Americans, and substitute “gay people” or “transgered people” or whatever other protected class, and you’d be arrested. In Canada, at least. Not (yet) in America.
    Are you smart enough to get it?

  18. “Take the average statement you post here about Americans, and substitute “gay people” or “transgered people” or whatever other protected class, and you’d be arrested. In Canada,”

    Now this is funny. Find one! We tossed our last blasphemy law in 2018 BTW.

  19. Pengun is actually agreeing with me, he’s just too stupid to realize it. The equation is really simple: Government decides what speech is an offense = end of freedom of speech. It matters not in the least what they call it.

    Brian, if somebody said the sun rises in the east, pengun would argue. You’d have an easier time trying to convince a post and accomplish just as much.

  21. Pengun is a troll that infests out comments. I recently heard that he also posts at Patterico, which makes sense as Patrick has lost 85% of his readers and has only left wing trolls left.

    Try not to feed him.

  22. Anyone else feeling especially unmoored this week, with piles of witnesses to fraud, and now video seemingly to show undeniable proof, all not even being debunked, but just ignored?
    I guess we all go about our business knowing there is some illegitimacy to things, but how are we supposed to just carry on when our faces are being so brazenly shoved in it?

  23. Brian:

    Just keep in mind that a government which is installed without the consent of the governed is not legitimate and can only require obedience by force. And be responded to the same way. [and to be honest the size of a minority that so regards the government is smaller than you think to register it illegitimate]

    We are in a waiting phase.

    Subotai Bahadur

  24. A Biden administration will have all the legitimacy of a three dollar bill. Very few of us have day to day dealings with the federal government. That complicates the emotional response. The policeman handing us a ticket is no more connected.

    It is telling that those localities with a long history of corruption are the ones with a history of strict gun control. If Biden gets his way, he will use the gun laws to make a huge number of people have to decide between disarming and becoming federal felons. This will dramatically change the dynamic.

    Every new boss goes through the experience of learning that telling someone to do something is not the same as actually getting it done. How they go from there is usually the difference between leading and dictating, between success and failure.

    All of the democrat “leaders” have shown ample evidence of which side of the divide they inhabit. Unfortunately, most of the republicans are no better. A minority only have any real world accomplishments. I would have put Romney on the other side from where he appears to be, so even real world success is not infallible.

  25. I still think our best analogue is the Pilgrimage of Grace. People know that their culture is being destroyed, and know it needs to be resisted, but they still have enough respect and deference for the government that they can’t overcome, and that is what will be used to crush them.
    I don’t know why I’m so surprised this week. I honestly thought in early 2017 that if it was shown to be true that Trump was spied on that there would be bipartisan outrage and response. I don’t know why I should now have expected even video evidence of fraud to get through to anyone.

  27. yes we know of the human rights commissions and how they went after ezra levant and mark steyn, we’re probably more cognizent of canadian politics, going back to the chretien era, and even further back, stockwell day anyone, then you are about American politics

  28. Strictly speaking, free speech should require that anything can be said, written or published by anyone that is not going to cause immediate violence, with the burden all on the state to prove that. So unless one is haranguing some group of people with arms in hand, all’s well.

    And even then, it’s the armed gathering that should be the chief offense.

    I’m in the English tradition, so I’m willing to go along with speech restrictions that build on that to prevent mass haranguing by unarmed people, since who wants private citizens to be harassed in public square. We have ample places to hold protests against public targets. Plus there’s a tradition that goes back before yesterday of treating such things as incitement to riot. I’m willing to concede “immediate public disorder” as a valid worry, but then I’m a bit of a statist about lost of stuff.

    Beyond that, we’re in troubling areas, hate or no hate. And this sort of hate was pretty marginal in Canada of the 709s and 80s when these kinds of laws really got going, anyway, and has not appreciably disappeared or even declined since.

    As to whether they can be considered a blasphemy law, yes I get its a loaded term and very tied to traditional ideas of what kind of belief set constitutes a religion, since that’s where the word comes from. In the linguistic sense, it cannot be so called.

    Still, what else to convey the deeper meaning of criminalizing speech that offends someone else’s sense of the moral order, cosmology, or the nature of humanity and its relationship to the material universe? These things are all essentially religious whether they call themselves that or not and whether they have a deity or not.

    The idea of hate speech has already been invoked by the aggrieved (I’d have to see if the laws have been actually used) when people say things about Islam that would, within Christianity, be considered theological dispute, and would, from non-Christians, be considered legitimate questioning of its tenets. You can elicit that reaction from some by merely questioning whether Muhammad was a prophet or whether the Koran is an eternal text from heaven.

    For a non-theist example, it is possible to evoke cries of hate speech by questioning whether or not gender is a real thing distinct from sex, whether there are infinite genders, or 42, or only 2, corresponding to but distinct from the two sexes, or even by suggesting biological sex is still real (that’s a very 2017 position), or by suggesting that perhaps the human individual’s capacity to define his or her (!) own concept of existence might not extend to the redefinition of the material. None of that is hatred. It’s even only mildly sarcastic at the very end, and if sarcasm were hatred progressives could not speak at all. What it is is a series of metaphysical retorts against metaphysical propositions, retorts that cannot be permitted because they question the propositions. That’s the essence of blasphemy law.

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