In her supposedly non campaign tour during which she is theoretically not seeking the republican presidential nomination Sarah Palin told us:
Come on, everyone knows who Paul Revere, the silversmith and patriot is. “He warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.
Of course all the good progressives, including the supposedly respectable right wing, have been brought up on the hate America first history which erases from our past the fact that Paul Revere was fighting gun control, and which erases from history anything related to his fight against gun control, such as ringing the bells to sound the alarm, such as warning the British that any attempt to disarm the people would be resisted with deadly force.
So they promptly sneered at her supposed ignorance
“Not the history channel versionâ€Â they said. “Not the version we were taught in schoolâ€, revealing their own ignorance.
Indeed was not, for the version you were taught in school, the version on the history channel, was the hate America first version.
Whether she gets the nomination or not, she reveals how ignorant and out of contact with reality our elite is. She is the one and only major politician running against our ruling elite.
Paul Revere’s ride was to fight gun control. The Pilgrim father’s were not thanking the Indians for giving them corn, but thanking God for his wisdom in commanding capitalism, or guiding them back to capitalism. And Darwin’s big idea was natural selection, not the idea that similarities between different species are due to blood relationships, common descent. Common descent, in the sense that families of species, such as the mammals, are actual families by blood if you go back far enough, was Lamarck’s big idea. Darwin’s big idea was that natural selection was a plausible explanation for different races arising, and developing into different species.
“He warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms”?
No. He wasn’t warning the British of anything. He was warning the Americans that the British were coming to confiscate the weapons in the armory at Concord, Mass. He did it with lanterns and by yelling. No bells.
She badly garbled it. She’s lazy and ignorant. She’s about my age, and the version they taught me in school was correct. I don’t know what “History Channel version” you think the liberals are referring to, but she got the standard traditional American history version substantially wrong. “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”. Nowadays kids probably learn a poem about an adopted transsexual asian girl having two illegal-immigrant Mexican mommies who celebrate their matching abortions or some such horseshit, but nobody’s talking about that.
OK, she didn’t pay attention in school. As an adult, couldn’t she have done ten minutes of homework before publicly humiliating herself, and by extension humiliating the entire tea party/fiscal-conservative movement?
No. She couldn’t. It’s not in her to do ten minutes of homework before shooting her mouth off in public on a subject she knows nothing about. She does not care about getting the facts right. Yeah, her gut “gets” America, but she cannot be trusted with responsibility because she cannot be bothered to focus on the issue at hand, get the facts straight, and think seriously about it. She is a lightweight. She is not Ronald Reagan. Reagan got his facts straight.
This was not selective editing. This is Palin in her own words, and it is a disaster. BELLS? WARNING THE BRITISH? BELLS? ARE YOU SHITTING ME?
She’s a disaster. As a president, she would be a hopelessly ineffective laughingstock. She has finally convinced me that she is more unprepared than Obama. I didn’t think that was possible, but it is.
You people are laughably ignorant, demonstrating once again that is a lot easier to meet the requirements to be politically correct if you are as thick as two planks glued together.. Look it up in a history book written before the days of hate-America-first history. The New Century Speaker for School and College, published 1905.
Of course this would require you to read old books, but old books are like kryptonite to a progressive. Since they were written by dead white males, no respectable person will read them for fear that dangerous and forbidden thoughts might contaminate his brain. Like a vampire confronted with a bible, a progressive will cringe in fear before any dangerously old book.Page 326
The life of Colonel Paul Revere, page 203
You may sneer at the version of history kids today are taught, where perhaps it was an adopted transexual negro girl with two illegal immigrant Mexican mommies that saved the day, rather than a dead white male, but the version of history you were taught is equally ludicrous, for while dead white males are allowed to save the day, they are saving the day for modern liberal progressivism, gun control, and democratically chosen taxes, rather than liberty – and this incident reveals how ignorant and out of touch people like you are. It exposes not Palin to ridicule, but you to ridicule.
Ever since 1905 or so, kids have been taught hate-america-first history, and in this incident, Palin reveals how ignorant and stupid the supposed elite is.
I expect this sort of silly ignorance from Harvard graduates and Nobel prize winners, but am surprised to read people like that posting on my blog, which usually has a higher grade of commenter.
Also initially puzzled that one of these got onto your blog. But it looks like a case of incomplete decontamination to me. A deprecates Obama, which is a good sign, yet signs on with the anti-Palin crowd.
That is, the anti-Obama thing may be the result of thought, but the Palin thing clearly isn’t. (May also be a result of accidentally split allegiances.)
Notice you don’t even need to know history to realize A’s ‘comment’ is empty. There’s lots of subtle hints, and at least two glaring ones.
1: Lots of insults. (Which is one reason you should cool it with your own.) What A finds most important is clearly Palin’s character, which he doesn’t like. Apparently A doesn’t realize that nobody should care what he thinks of her character.
2: A’s ‘argument’ is “the version they taught me in school was correct,” after which he changes the subject. I guess A thinks this is a convincing thing to assert? Also, clearly doesn’t think the facts are that important, as judged by the relative time spent on them.
Could also be pure tribal in-grouping, I suppose. Either way, meaningless to the scholar.
I certainly know nothing and care less about this Paul fellow, or even about things Palin says. However, I do find interesting that these ‘gaffes’ appear to be strategic, and how very adroitly her opponents shoot themselves in the foot.
Supposedly, the worst vice is ignorance. But what A (and etc) mean by ignorance is apparently not knowing obscure and generally useless trivia. As a bonus, they don’t know it.
This vice is an indication of scholar morality. Problem is, Palin’s not a scholar and it doesn’t apply to her. (Reagan was just pretending.)
I arrive at the core question that interests me: Palin’s not a scholar. Huge groups of Americans adore her. Apparently, this scares the daylights out of USG’s scholar elite. So…do I have an accurate narrative?
It upsets me more than it should that anyone should treat the version taught in school and on the history channel as authoritative – note the attitude that the more derived source is more reliable than the more original source – more reliable in the sense of being more orthodox. They don’t consider reading Paul Revere’s account of his ride, because poor Paul Revere was too ignorant to know the latest orthodoxy concerning his ride, so supposedly we should not pay attention to what he said. As my nine year old son sarcastically observed on another point of orthodoxy “Just ask a schoolteacher. They know everything!â€
As you point out, ‘A’ affirms his loyalty to the official narrative, as if it was the Nicean crede, a description of conditions in heaven, rather than a purporting to be a description of things in this world. If he cared about the actual facts, would invoke a source with more plausible claim to be grounded on evidence. Instead he invokes the source with the most plausible claim to be grounded on proper authority.
Back in the day’s of the Arian Heresy, people would kill each other over whether the son was co-substantial or con-substantial with the father, even though no one could explain the difference.
The background story of Paul Revere’s ride is that the British intended to disarm the people, and were trying to keep the operation secret to to last minute. It was all about weapons, and a government seizure of weapons. I knew that background, but not the specific details. Knowing that background, but not the specific details, it made complete sense to me that bells would be rung, and that Paul Revere would warn the British not to try it on. I did not look up the specific details (that bells had been rung, and he had warned the British) until ‘A’ affirmed the official narrative.To those exposed to a weapons free narrative, in which right wing British were attempting to impose evil right wingery upon the progressive democratic Americans, Sarah Palin’s version sounded mighty strange – but if one reads older histories, modern narratives frequently sound mighty strange. The difference was not that I knew the details, but that the Sarah Palin version fitted what I knew, and the version of her critics did not fit what I knew.
It looked spontaneous to me – but then politicians mighty good at looking looking spontaneous. While Sarah Palin clearly calculates what she says, I find it plausible that Sarah Palin has simply been exposed to unexpurgated history, and was surprised to find that her audience had not – that she did not learn unexpurgated history as a consciously rebellious act in defiance of central authority, but simply as history. Maybe the newest version of history did not make it all the way to small town Alaska. The further you get from metropolitan authority, the further behind the latest orthodoxy schoolteachers and such are. It looked to me as if she was simply unaware of the official narrative of Paul Revere’s ride, and expected her audience to be familiar with the earlier version, much as I was unaware of the official narrative of Darwin and common descent until I was “correctedâ€. She looked out of touch with her audience. If calculated, she would have expected her audience to not know. She was genuinely surprised when her audience failed to get it.
Of course, she is a politician and a good one, so how it looked, was how she intended it to look. Chances are that she was speaking truth to power as a revolutionary act of defiance, but did it as if stumbling in order to look sweet, feminine, and non threatening.
Palin has not been credentialed as subscribing to the official doctrine.
The official doctrine has, like, communism, become talmudic. Because there is so much of it, only a highly educated scholar can actually be orthodox. Thus orthodoxy becomes a source of pride. Those who deviate from official orthodoxy are derided. It is OK to be one of those who inadvertently deviate due to ignorance. Those ignorant of orthodoxy can be hewers of wood and drawers of water provided they adopt a suitably humble attitude to the official truth.
The party says a great many things, and members of the ignorant masses are not expected to know everything the party says. It suffices that they see five fingers when told to.
I love how this bell thing is supposed to be important.
The question is: did this dude warn the British about the militia? (Also, do you mean ‘warn them about’ or ‘threaten them with?’ Though yes I read the source and it’s warn in the sense of threaten.) His particular tactics should barely rate. It’s like these people take classes on missing the forest for the trees.
Of course the real question is why the shit anyone should care about Paul Revere. Let’s assume Palin was wrong. I bet she also can’t rattle off stock ticker prices or the contents of my fridge. I fail to see how this is at all relevant to running for or being a figurehead, let alone actual governance of things that currently exist.
The lying, of course, is very relevant to those things. Just not the subject.
Evidence IS the proper authority. The party simply attempts to usurp it. Sadly, quite effectively in most cases.
Man, I really like that ‘the party’ thing. “Which one?” “Err, sorry, I wasn’t aware there was more than one. Enlighten me.” You’re right of course; there’s the party, and there’s Palin. And the party’s all like, “Oh shit! Democracy! Noooooo!” That would even be the correct response, as Democracy is an illness, except that being ill, even terminally ill, beats being dead.
I should have extended my ignorance thing further. It’s of course mainly code for ‘disobedience.’ (Check: the existence of tolerated versus intolerated ignorance – must be code.) But, to re-emphasize the scholar elite angle, it is disobedience to the thoughts of intellectuals. Warrior elites don’t much care what you say as long as you do as you’re told. (Police are a fine example. They’ll take quite a bit of verbal abuse…but you WILL get in their car when they want you to.)
I don’t know how I missed it, but A asserted he learned it in school, immediately after your post which asserts the school version is wrong. Way to beg the question. It could have been strategically designed to make the anti-Palin crowd look innocent of logic. (Logic where A->B, A!…therefore B, not code for anything. I wonder how much of the misuse of ‘ignorant’ is because the abusers can’t themselves tell the difference.)
Let’s combine the strategic and accidental Palin explanations. Palin knows she has a bunch of unexpurgated facts at hand. She doesn’t know which ones are politically useful, but has a specific tactic planned out for when she stumbles across one.
By the way, I had no idea Darwin was supposed to be about common descent until you told me, though I was aware Lamarck got made fun of. It is impossible to genuinely make that mistake even reading about his contemporaries, let alone actually reading the stuff itself. The idea of evolution came about long before Darwin.
From another angle; how can you practice animal husbandry and not figure out some form of evolution?
I’d seen the ‘selection and common descent’ formulation, though. I thought they were being sloppy and meant just selection. I mean, selection doesn’t mean anything without pre-supposing descent, right?
Tolerated ignorance is not knowing the official version. Intolerable ignorance is knowing the true version. More precisely, Palin acted surprised that her audience did not know that Paul Revere was stopping the gun grabbers – a gentle and seemingly innocent implication that the elite do not know $#!% from beans
A lot of university courses, especially the courses that mostly women take, don’t actually teach you anything very useful. Rather, they credential you as a member of the club. When Sarah Palin gives us a politically incorrect version of history, she is denigrating that club. She implies that members of the club are surprisingly ignorant, since they don’t know this stuff about Paul Revere. She may have been genuinely confused and surprised that her audience did not know about Paul Revere, or she may have been feigning surprise and confusion to stick it to the elite, or perhaps something of both.
This is explained away in the revised version of history “Biology Todayâ€, 1972, page 641 as Lamarck saying that though all mammals are descended from reptiles, they are not descended from the same reptiles. In fact, however, if you read the pre Darwin evolutionists, they propose the grouping of kinds into families, such as the mammals, as evidence of blood kinship, as literal families. Lamarck presents fossil evidence of one species of shellfish giving rise to many species of shellfish, and explains the observed resemblances between one kind and another by a hypothetical of a single blade of grass one of whose seeds when one way, and one another, so that one individual blade of grass was mother to two species. But you do have to read a non trivial amount of Lamarck for it to be undeniably clear what he saying. He does not say it as concisely as later English language summaries of him do.
Over time, what Lamarck said at tedious length got simplified down to something more snappy. Those discussing the history of evolutionary thought after Darwin but before 1972 tell us: tell us: “Lamarck and many others of his time believed that the different species of a genus resembled each other because they were of common descent, and each species had gradually changed in form and become distinct and ceased to interbreed;”
So if you read the history of evolutionary thought written up before 1972, and after 1972, the difference is striking, though to check which version was true, I had to return to the original sources, (or rather the translation of Lamarck by Elliot, whereupon the excessive wordiness of Lamarck required some reading.)
Wait, that wasn’t the case?
The rebellious colonists were the progressives of their day – the descendants of Cromwell and his faction and the spirit of the French revolution – down with the king and let the people rule!
Yes, it was “gun control” but on the other hand letting a rebellious populous keep military arms that they have said they intend to use against the legitimate sovereign authority isn’t good governance.
You are correct. It was the case. The concealment, however, is to conceal that progressivism has become alarmingly more progressive than it was.
“ignorant and out of contact with reality”
Christ, that’s Palin in a nutshell.
Listen up, and you shall hear,
Of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,
Had he not ridden to tell the Brits
that we had guns, those Limey nits,
They would have run all over our freedoms–
How stupid of they–to assume our “be dumbs”!
Did they not know? Did they not care?
We surely had guns, oh know, oh dear.
If you don’t understand how dumb Sarah Palin looks and how you’ve confused your own poor choice in governmental representation with her public humiliation, there is no hope for you. The so-called lefties aren’t mad because Sarah said anything one way or the other–they’re made because idiots like you are too stupid to get how she is wrong so many ways it ain’t funny. So sit down, grow up, get a little wisdom, and shut up.
She looks dumb because she gave the correct version of history, instead of the politically correct version of history?
The previous version of history, briefly described by Sarah Palin, and supported by the original sources, is that General Gage was ordered to grab the colonists guns. As he prepared to do so, word leaked, so he put the town under lockdown to prevent the word from spreading.. Paul Revere snuck out of town in a small boat with oars muffled by a petticoat, and then proceeded to ride like hell to spread the word. Bells were rung to bring the townsfolk together to hear the word. The British caught him, and he proceeded to warn them that they would face strong resistance.
History of the Siege of Boston and the battles of Lexingon, page 88
Lord Dartmouth instructs General Thomas Gage:
Quote
News of this plan got out (page 58) and General Gage gave orders that the town be locked down to prevent the news from spreading – but Paul Revere rowed across the river with oars muffled by being wrapped in a petticoat.
Unmitigated bullshit.
Did Paul Revere set out that night with the object of getting caught and having a pistol barrel pressed to his skull?
Was he actively trying to avoid getting caught?
Had he NOT gotten caught, would there have been any notable change to subsequent events? Would the British have done anything differently?
The point of Paul Revere’s ride, the goal he was trying to accomplish, was to carry the warning to the colonists. He was doing this for the larger purpose of _preventing_ the British from seizing the weapons, but the _warning_ was to the Americans.
Arguing the contrary is incredibly dishonest. Palin mis-spoke, and then tried to defend her mistake rather than correcting it. Paul Revere was not trying to warn the British, did not set out for the purposes of warning the British, and the ten seconds or so he spend during that night that might possibly be argued to be such, failed to have any consequences whatsoever.
You seem to be arguing that history could easily have turned out in such a way that the Palin’s account would not have been true, and the “educated” account would have been true, that the educated account, even though false, was truthy.
But as history actually happened, Palin’s account was true, and the “educated” account, however truthy it might have been, was not true, was in fact, ignorant.
Palin uttered some fragments of history with which the “educated” were unfamiliar. These were not the most important and relevant facts of history, but they were facts – facts that she was familiar with, that I was familiar with, and that the “educated” were not familiar with.
Indeed, this is pretty much a standard test to check the intellectual level of a group or individual – make an arcane reference, and see if they catch it, a reference that the in group, one’s intellectual equals will catch, and the outgroup, one’s inferiors, will not catch, thereby reinforcing ingroup solidarity and feelings of superiority. If the reference is arcane, it is always arguably not the most important and relevant fact.
Among leftists, reference to arcane points of Marxist and Freud serve this purpose. Among conservatives, references to arcane points of revolutionary history. In the manosphere and the human biodiversity sphere, arcane points of Darwinism and evolutionary psychology. In all cases the point is that the insiders get a nice little glow reminding each other that they know stuff that outsiders do not know.
Actually it seems the stink goes back to just before the Civil War. Paul Revere was little known before that. What most people “know” about Revere comes from Longfellow’s poem. Longfellow took many liberties with the truth, which he apparently actually knew, and wrote the poem to stir up pro-Union patriotic sentiment.
http://www.biography.com/news/paul-reveres-ride-facts