Jim Bell vindicated

[John Young]

Al-right, Robert, the white thinking guy's burden. Al-beit Al-coholic.

At 08:17 AM 5/6/2015, you wrote:

> > On May 6, 2015, at 6:46 AM, John Young 
> <jya at pipeline.com> wrote a splendid bit of Younglish:
> >
> > Anselm or another really smart Arab philosopher [
]
>
><further crypto-leftist mid-twentieth-century 
>libtard pseudo-intellectual jiggery-pokery elided
>
>
>
>ObPedantry: Anselm was not an Arab, his 
>reductive "proof of god" as “perfect" parlor trick notwithstanding.
>
>
>There were *no* Arab philosophers, much less "really smart" ones.
>
>Avicenna, for instance, was Persian, and like 
>most Arab-conquered middle eastern types by 
>then, regurgitated earlier Greek text using 
>Indian astronomy math, including the zero, 
>finance, (the foreign exchange contract, the 
>letter of credit, and the demand-deposit check, 
>say), and science. A bare fraction of which was 
>actually “saved” by rampaging Islamic Arab 
>rapine, physical, intellectual, and otherwise. 
>There were *copies*, even better ones, of the 
>contents of the Library at Alexandria, all over 
>the ancient middle east, and even after it was 
>burned by both Ceasar and a Bishop or two, it 
>was the Muslims who actually burned its entire 
>contents. And all the other libraries besides.
>
>Averroes, another leading “Arab” philosophical 
>light, was a Spaniard. And an Aristotelian. So 
>no new philosophy there, either.
>
>All of Arab “contributions” to “civilization” 
>were derivative. The lateen sail was Roman 
>(“Lateen”, geddit?), for instance. Damascus steel was Indian wootz steel.
>
>
>The Arabs' principal accomplishment, if you can 
>call it that, was destroying the ancient world 
>wherever they went, and replacing it with abject 
>barbarism for most of a thousand years. Their 
>piracy in the Mediterranean killed trade between 
>east and west, (and north and south) for the 
>entirety of their command of it and was the 
>proximal cause of the Dark Ages in the West.
>
>Their contribution to philosophy, if one could 
>call it that, was to declare, after they got 
>sick of listening to Persians and Egyptians 
>prattle badly-regurgitated Greek for a century 
>or so, that *nothing* happens without god’s 
>will, which obviated the need for cause and 
>effect at all. You struck two stones together, 
>and god *decided* that there would be a spark, 
>you see. Which is how the world got blessed with 
>Sharia “law” and all the rest of Islam’s barbaric world view.
>
>As long as there can be nothing unless God wills 
>it, there can be no Islamic science. At least 
>the Orthodox and the Catholics had to somehow 
>incorporate cause and effect into their view of 
>the world, or there would not be any sin. 
>Seeding their own intellectual demise, at least, 
>at the hands of the scientific method later on.
>
>In the west, philosophy was made the 
>“handmaiden” of theology for more than fifteen 
>hundred years. For a thousand of those years, 
>philosophy in Islam was a shit-house slave.
>
>
>Philosophy didn’t actually occur in the west 
>until Newton figured out how to use mathematics 
>to deal with infinity in order to calculate the 
>motion of objects. Discovered *again*, 
>apparently. Palimpsests have been recovered from 
>Orthodox codices made of scraped-over scrolls 
>containing Archimedes (who else? :-)), dealing 
>in infinitesimals, at least, if not the actual 
>epsilons and deltas which finally nailed 
>calculus to mathematical terra-firma by Bolzano in 1817.
>
>After Newton, a veritable festival of 
>philosophical navel-gazing began in the West 
>after, with the possible exception of the Stoics 
>and Cynics, almost two thousand years. All to 
>collapse again after Godel proved he was his own 
>grandpa. Or, at least, he *could*, Groucho, 
>belong to a club that would have him as a member.
>
>
>And, of course, Existentialism, like 
>Freudianism, is merely literature. Okay. 
>Freudianism is really *bad* literature, with 
>Freud conflating Oedipus with Hamlet. Besides, 
>being, you know, proven to be unfalsifiable 
>pseudoscience, in the same breath that Karl 
>Popper took it out with Marxism in the 1950’s. 
>Existentialism isn’t even that. It’s another 
>example of Eric Raymond’s "Gramscian Damage”: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260>.
>
>
>
>The bush weed here on Anguilla’s okay, but it’s 
>clearly not as good as John’s stash. :-)
>
>
>Cheers,
>RAH