Downplaying your Intelligence

In the hierarchy of conceit, intelligence reigns.

Thread

@FionaPearman @ScottMorrisonMP Morrison is our statue of unempathic neoliberalism - erected by evangelical and corporate Australia to celebrate their victory over compassion, equality and secular humanism. 

Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.

@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
Australia politics isn’t working for people, and it sure isn’t working for the planet.

@ScottMorrisonMP My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project, delivered through two generations of privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, underfunding of government services (locked in by tax cuts),...

@ScottMorrisonMP restricting freedom of information, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

@ScottMorrisonMP Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.

1. On Fri. 8 Jan. Military Intel Contact said to keep phones on, charged and ready for Tier 4B notification as the RV release was being expedited and our start was at any time.

As a scholar who has researched and written quite a bit about the Anabaptists, can we set a few things straight?

1. Baptists are not Anabaptists. Their history is theirs; ours is ours. We have similarities, but we are not them. We honor them by not using them for our purposes.

2. Not all Anabaptists were in Münster, and many if not most Anabaptists at the time were just as appalled as we are by the Münsterites. So please drop the tropes equating all Anabaptists with Münster. Informed and honest scholars are known by their right retelling of history.

3. The same truth applies to the other types of Reformation Radicals. There is a great difference between those who have become known as Evangelical Anabaptists on the one hand and Spiritualists, Rationalists, etc. on the other hand. Respect them as you also wish to be respected.

4. Yes, there were Anabaptists who toyed with various heresies, including Arianism, Socinianism, and Celestial Flesh Christology. But there were also many Anabaptists who affirmed, commented upon, and used the traditional Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed.

And if you want to do the honest research, you can also find a few heretical Roman Catholic Popes and more than a few heretical Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans. and whomever else you want to talk about. Good historical theology doesn’t play favorites; it speaks the truth.

Some familiar figures are pushing the absurd and defamatory claim that Ken Loach supports Holocaust denial. The story of this bogus talking-point, which relies upon multiple layers of falsehood and guilt-by-association, makes for a revealing case-study. 1/

It dates back to the 2017 Labour conference. In a NYT op-ed, Howard Jacobson claimed that “a motion to question the truth of the Holocaust was proposed” from the conference floor—a crude fabrication, which the NYT sanctioned in its pages. 2/

If you follow the link supplied by Jacobson or his editors, you’ll see that he was wrong on 3 counts: it wasn’t a motion, it wasn’t at the conference, and it wasn’t in favour of Holocaust denial. Quite the hat-trick! 3/

At a fringe meeting, granted no official status by Labour, an Israeli-Jewish speaker, Miko Peled, had said that he didn’t think Holocaust denial should be a criminal offense (which it is in some European countries). 4/

This is a perfectly reasonable position to hold—that opinions, no matter how wrong-headed or morally objectionable, should not be a matter for the criminal law—and of course it does not mean that Peled himself questions the truth of the Holocaust. 5/