John Barton

[John Barton @bartjw]

@RealJamesWoods I really don’t understand why we send cops out without them.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@NickMurphy1999 @RockChartrand Many large incumbents have been displaced by start ups. The reason coops aren’t seen to displace the companies they work in is that labor know how is one piece of a much larger expertise and asset set required. And it’s not the hardest piece.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@vitt2tsnoc

[John Barton @bartjw]

@NickMurphy1999 @RockChartrand Who promised you it’d be easy to disrupt incumbents?

Competition works both ways.

But if you choose to be cynical, you’d need to explain what happened to IBM, Yahoo, AOL, Sears, GM, USSteel, and countless other once dominant giants.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@WeimarClub You’re missing that coercive imposition of the socialist vision & its inevitable economic failures leads to dissent. Those who’ve taken power to impose the vision then need to develop a police state to maintain it. That leads to more dissent & ultimately to bloodshed. Every time.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@Floridap8triot @NYCMayor @GovKathyHochul @NYPDnews They expect no consequences. Broken windows policing says that this isn’t a minor thing, that showing no consequence for disrespect to police has further consequences. I’d be fine with these people seeing harsh arrest and jail time. Set an example for all to see

[John Barton @bartjw]

@ZeekArkham Is there an ethnicity anywhere that could not point to some historical grievance? To nurse that like a man desperately blowing on an ember to keep a fire alive is a waste of one‘s own life and the opportunities that those ancestors would be grateful to see had been achieved.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@PeterDClack I remembered hyped fears of irreversible desertification in the 70s and 80s. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification was founded then &still exists. If it were happening still, you know climate change would be blamed. That the earth is greening is rarely cited cc:@LLBiggers

[John Barton @bartjw]

@amuse I think it evidence of a prior self loathing that requires extreme mythologizing to offset its effect. It’s sad that someone who feels that need can’t rise above the tribal claims of success to share in a sense of achievement as part of a larger community.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@mattvanswol This would only happen after an extended period without consequences. Its the reason for broken windows policing. Everyone of these kids should expect to get beaten with a nightstick and to receive jail time for this. If they did, it wouldn’t happen.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@250YearsAgoLive The Declaration didn’t make us ”officially independent,” it declared our official intention to be. To realize the intention required a difficult war.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

For America's 250th, I think we should reflect on something important about the American Experiment.

Simply, when we say we want to defend and protect Western Civilization, the American Experiment is a crucial cornerstone of what that means.

We often hear that the foundations of Western Civilization are Judeo-Christian, which really makes the Jew-haters mad, but when we interrogate that claim, it's not really clear that's true... until America came along with its little experiment 250 years ago, and through the century and a half before that.

European history is an interesting mélange of ideas, and certainly, at least from the 6th century forward, it was dominated by Christianity as it came up against, fought, and even blended with the various Pagan systems that dominated "Western" thought. Elements of Rome were present both in the Christianity and in the surrounding Europe, but there's no real basis upon which this could be called "Judeo-Christian," nor "Western" in any way we would recognize.

Not until the Renaissance did ideas and movements outside of the Catholic Tradition really start to take root, and many of those were mystical and strange. We look to these as "Western," but in most respects as we mean the word today, they were not.

Only when the Reformation began in 1517 did we begin to see what we would regard as "Western Civilization" emerging. Martin Luther called for the Christian faithful to turn away from the authority of the Roman Church and toward the authority of the Bible it claims to be built upon, including the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, which are the Jewish Torah and Tanakh. The seeds of a Judeo-Christian West emerged, sprouted, and began to take root from this moment.

Some in Luther's wake, including John Calvin, took this Scripture seriously, and the various Protestant movements began to spread across Europe. With them came conflict and war, some of the bloodiest and most brutal in history (never mind the Inquisition). The infamous Thirty-Years War comes to mind immediately.

On the other side of that horrible conflict, we arrive at the Peace of Westphalia. It is the Westphalian tradition, which recognizes the sovereignty of nation states and non-interference in domestic affairs that is the first thing we would recognize today as "the West" we rightly feel called to defend, protect, and even renew in our postmodern malaise.

All was not well, though. Even in Jolly-ye-olde England, by this point under Anglican control, living under the expansive freedoms outlined by the Magna Carta, these Calvinists in particular were not considered particularly welcome. Throughout the 17th century, great persecutions, including the one that sent the Pilgrims eventually to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the later "Killing Times" that murdered countless Presbyterians, defined this alleged beacon of "Western" civilization.

Several important things happened at once as a result of this turmoil and these developments. First, many, Pilgrims and others, fled to the New World to start a new way of life away from the troubles and persecutions that defined European life. Second, across Europe, and especially in Scotland, the Enlightenments (plural) sprung up, resuscitating reason to take its place alongside faith, against tyranny and mysticism.

These Enlightenments varied widely and do not represent one thing or one current. France, largely following Rousseau, created a monstrosity in the name of Reason, casting out its Catholic faith with prejudice and inventing revolutionary terrorism and totalitarian tyranny in their modern form. Germany tried to engineer philosophy, as they would, to create a complete system of the Ideal incorporated into the real. We could call those things and their descendants, including Communism and Fascism and Woke, "the West" or "Western Civilization," I guess, but that fails to explain why those are rightly regarded as the mortal enemies, alongside Islamism and Russian imperialism, of Western Civilization.

But! England and Scotland had their Enlightenment(s) too: Smith, Hume, Locke, Reid, Wilson, and this is important. While imperfect, they offered a rebuke against the European Enlightenments and a different path. From the Scottish, we get the emphasis on liberty and common sense. From the English, we get the emphasis on tolerance and order.

Those who fled to America wanted something different than the European "West." Yes to the Westphalian model. Yes to the English Liberal tradition and the Magna Carta. No, absolutely not, to the persecution. No, absolutely not, to tyranny of any sort, particularly religious tyranny.

What these Pilgrims and others, many Calvinists, carried with them to the American continent was a burning desire to pursue their faiths unhindered and unmolested by state interference. This was the first American Dream in many respects, so it accordingly finds its place in our First Amendment.

Their ambition, though, was remarkable. It was, in the words of John Winthrop, writing about the Shining City on a Hill in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to become Boston later, in 1630, that "the God of Israel would dwell among us." They understood how that can be done because they had read their Bibles. There is only one way: God will dwell among those who keep His covenant.

Sure, they were Christian, not Jewish. In fact, they were VERY Christian. The covenant they kept is the covenant fulfilled as it came through Christ and was established on the Cross on Calvary. Nonetheless, it was these Calvinists who renewed the Judeo- in the Judeo-Christian foundation that we see as the West today. This was a wholly AMERICAN invention. It is also the true foundation of what we call Western Civilization.

These Pilgrims who laid the spiritual foundations of the American Experiment envisioned themselves renewing the Covenant of Sinai, of Moses, in a new Christian-Gentile way on a new continent, as a new covenant for a new people in a new land. They put the Judeo- back into the continuous framework that is Judeo-Christian: Jewish ethics, Jewish responsibility, Jewish "choseness" but for the Christian world, and for all to see. It was explicit, intentional, and a core article of their faith, not just personally but for the people they saw in this land.

You don't have to like it, but it's true. This is not only our heritage as Americans, but it is the defining characteristic of "the West" and the "Western Civilization" that Europe can't quite figure out how to live up to yet. (Even Canada hasn't quite figured it out!)

A century and a half after John Winthrop declared Boston-to-be a Judeo-Christian Shining City on the Hill, a kind of new Jerusalem on the new continent, many very learned men in all the important classics: Latin, Greek, and especially Hebrew, and conversant in the language of the Enlightenments of the day, set forth to break away from Jolly-ye-Olde England and make America a thing. Thus begins the West in earnest.

These men drew from those sources and pulled heavily from the English and Scottish Enlightenment(s), centering self-government, individual rights, appeal to reason as the uniquely humanizing force of man, and common sense, and they placed it firmly in the context of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. They knew the warnings against kings in the Tanakh and paired it with their experience with George III, that rat-bastard king. They envisioned America like the Israelites wandering the desert out of the bondage of Egypt and looking for that covenant at Sinai. They envisioned it so much that they imagined it vividly as the right symbolism for the new nation they were to create.

But they understood the need not just for Judeo- and Christian but also those fruits of the Enlightenment that were worth keeping. The Common Sense and Tolerance of Scotland and England, the focus on individual liberty, and the demand but not exaltation of human reason. This set them apart from the disastrous French Enlightenment, which they mined for ideas and mostly rejected as a horror. And they forged something new: a uniquely Judeo-Christian-American philosophy. A Western Civilization with three legs to its stool.

And this is "the West" we fight for and defend today, even against the excesses of European continental thought and other enemies besides. The West is the Judeo-Christian-American values system that was uniquely put together by the first American patriots, who understood in their wisdom the need to have three pillars to uphold a civilization truly worthy of free men: Jewish covenant and responsibility, Christian openness and mercy, and secular Enlightenment protections for the individual against the state, which cannot forge men's virtue but can only rape it.

The common thread is Common Sense, the greatest of the fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment, which is the thickest strand in the American Experiment's DNA. We each are endowed by our Creator, be that God Almighty as the God of Israel and Father of Christ, the Laws of Nature, or Nature's God, with faculties for making sense of the world: senses to perceive the world around us and sense-making rational faculties between our ears to interpret what we see. We are therefore all created equal in inherent dignity and have unalienable rights that no man has the authority to strip from us without our consent, which includes even the Man, meaning the government.

This thread is thickest because it is in the center of all three elements: Judeo-, Christian, and American in the vein of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is the beingness in the world taught by the Jews, the acceptance of our fate as humans, living under the kippah to remind us of who we are in juxtaposition to the Almighty. It is the general revelation that Medieval Christian thinkers realized must harmonize and testify to the Glory of God. It is the plain common sense that each of us has the ability to make sense of the world around us and thus the right to do our best at it without the hindrance or interference of busybodies or the state, especially in matters of conscience.

Some 190 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and articulated what makes it work. Democracy in America he called the book, and in it he says that America is great because it is good. This observation came to him due to seeing Americans in their churches, connecting to their responsibility to be good, so we often conclude that America is good because Americans are good. He also warned that if Americans ever cease to be good, then America will cease to be great.

What he was observing is the unique new covenant we call "Western Civilization" today. It's the responsibility of every American to be good in this uniquely American way, and because we have succeeded in this effort, more or less, for a quarter of a millennium now, America is still great. The bargain was always that we would govern ourselves, which requires, as John Adams put it, that we be a moral and religious people. That we keep the covenant, which was modeled for our founders at Sinai and consecrated on Golgotha, and that we do so because we see that it's just plain common sense to do so, obvious to anybody, inside a church or out.

BThis is "the West." It is the American Experiment, which is an experiment of blending the freedomsforced to be good, just as Jews are not forced to keep a single mitzvah. We must choose to be good, and we are invited to do so. If we do, as John Winthrop observed, we will know it because we are blessed. We will be like a shining city on a hill for all the world to see, a Jerusalem in North America, a second Goy Kadosh testifying to the power of being righteous because it is right to be righteous. If we don't, that too is our choice, and may we have the wisdom to return should we become the Prodigal Sons of this tremendous opportunity.

But! And this is my point! This is "the West." The West, Western Civilization, is the American Experiment, which is an experiment of blending the freedoms of the Enlightenments with the responsibilities that those freedoms demand, inwardly within ourselves that we might self-govern and outwardly that we might be a righteous and productive testament to what is possible when we make and keep a holy covenant.

Europe is no longer "the West" to the degree it rejects its foundations. In fact, it never was. It was merely the starting place for that great experiment, which is fundamentally and undeniably Judeo-Christian-American.

Happy Independence Day, America! Happy 250th! But remember! Today is a celebration of 250 years that ended yesterday and the first day of 250 more years to come, and it is wholly up to us to live up to who and what we are. Americans: remember who we are.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@BeingJWood “All the money“.
if that concept has any place in how you think the world works you’re off base before you start.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@johnmeikel11 @dom_lucre

[John Barton @bartjw]

@grok @Th3Seafox @scotus_wire @grok Summarize the initial case against the AG in the indictments and summarize a defense of her actions in the letters in controversy

[John Barton @bartjw]

@Th3Seafox @scotus_wire @grok @grok summarize the events and legal issues here from the first actions. Include a description of the players and assess the legality and motive of the moves

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

Douglas Murray on how Keir Starmer will be remembered

"If he's remembered at all it will be for him deciding that instead of dealing with bad things in the country, he would instead arrest the people who didn't like the bad things that were happening in the country"

[John Barton @bartjw]

@0x49fa98 @jmrphy Tattoos are graffiti on a work of art.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@sourceryy @friedberg Democrats will federalize the debts of California, and of other bankrupt blue states, if laws aren’t passed to prevent that. i worry that it would take an amendment to truly isolate the consequences of poor financial decisions to the states that made them.

[John Barton @bartjw]

@BillAckman @NYCMayor You should confirm it isn’t an old school partners desk w two sides.