Robert Dammers

C of E Lay Minister, Anna Chaplain
Retired IT Architect

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

I look forward to being invited to top myself "to save the NHS". It is no logical fallacy to be afraid of a "slippery slope" when nations like Canada and the Netherlands have already shown that (a) it *is* a slope and (b) it is Teflon coated and continually showered in WD40.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

I do not say this lightly: As a new and virulent strain of antisemitism spreads via algorithmic media and artificial intelligence, my life's work an an historian has been a failure. What now? A new essay with John-Clark Levin for @TheFP

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@Jonathan_Hinder @theninakai We've read the tweet. It manages to combine being deeply immoral with profound stupidity. It is worrying that you have a hand in the governance of the nation.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@ElementMan4 @s8mb A teeny, tiny landslide. Not of votes for Labour, but in the collapse of o alternatives.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@winstan9871 @afneil No, but since the correlation between that and anthropogenic CO2 is very weak, we are probably making ourselves unable to respond to changes we cannot influence. That is wicked insanity.

[Gail Heriot @GailHeriot]

The CA Legislature tried to strike these words from the state constitution in 2020 (put there by Prop 209 in 1996). The voters smacked them down when 57.23% said NO—despite the YES campaign outspending the NO team by more than 14 to 1. Now they’re trying again—calling it a “clarification” instead of an effort to gut the provision’s application to public education. Don’t believe them. If approved by the voters, this would be a major change. The aim is to pave the way for the recommendations of California’s Task Force on Reparations. The Task Force wants to make college free to African Americans no matter how well off their parents are and to get school districts to fund individual schools based on the race of the students who attend.

@christopherrufo

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

Always remember, folks, there is no antisemitism problem in Ireland.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

As an Imperial alumnus, I am very proud of their performance in #UniversityChallenge, but who can fail to be in awe of the amazing Madgewick and his team! What a performance! Congratulations!

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@JamoLeigh999 @Gabriele_Corno The AI forgot to add the tongue to the image of the cat licking.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@Rainmaker1973 Looks like a sheet bend, with the tarp being folded to provide the equivalent of the thicker rope.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@grok @EngrStudent @jpceo11 @BradBanko @RWMaloneMD My favourite is Windows NT (WNT) being one shift from VMS, both architected by Dave Cutler.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@clarescastle @WalkerMarcus Ditto!

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@WalkerMarcus Marcus, I'm in awe of the wonderful outreach you are performing each Christmas. I pray that it bears rich fruit - even if only in a season enriched.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@RealOwenHirsch @TheBlackHorse65 They are English and Canadian, and absolutely bloody marvellous. I'm hoping to get the CD for Christmas.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@EduardHabsburg Wonderful book! My Spiritual Director suggested it to me last year, and it has been such an important influence on me.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@MarkDennett13 @TheStingisBack Tee Hee. As I said, 50 years on, we're still quoting to each other.

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@MarkDennett13 @TheStingisBack We're the *opposite* of people!

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@BruvverEccles My favourite Christmas T-shirt (if you know, you know) :

[Robert Dammers @robertdammers]

@elonmusknews30 👍