Posted on 08/21/2016 7:19:49 AM PDT by C19fan
Dour, sexless, perpetually unamused… Queen Victoria has had a notoriously bad press since her death in 1901.
Yet according to A.N. Wilson, the historical adviser to ITV drama Victoria, this reputation is not only wide of the mark, it was deliberate propaganda masterminded by a Royal Family desperate to suppress the truth about her passionate nature.
The court appointed two misogynistic homosexuals to get this message across – the suave courtier Viscount Esher and the academic and writer Arthur Benson, who wrote the lyrics to Land Of Hope And Glory. Together, they sanitised her letters for publication.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I read the same thing about Liz II. After WWII and her marriage to that card Phil, she couldn’t get enuff of that funky stuff.
bump
LOL. I see what you did there...
Couldn’t let it pass, I know it was a stale joke.
As much as the tobacco must be by now...:-)
The Greeks and Romans of Antiquity created Western Civilization defining the Laws of Geometry and Physics which laid the foundation for Architecture, Astronomy and Civil Engineering.
Further, their achievements in Governance, Literature, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy; among other disciplines are even greater.
Victoria lived from 1819-1901, during which period the most notable scientific nostrum was Darwin’s Evolution; as yet an unproven Theory.
Golden Age???. Laughable.
Bringing civilization (imperfect, but still an improvement) to much of the broader world via the Empire was nothing to sneeze at....
ISWYDT.
+1
Victoria’s life spanned from horse transport to steam, electricity, telegraphs, etc. It’s where humanity entered the modern age.
oh posh
There were plenty of notable British inventions during the Victorian age. To name a few: Portland cement, the Christmas card, Sheffield steel, tarmac, inflatable bicycle tires, city police, The Tube, the Cornish Engine, the Pram (baby stroller), light-sensitive photographic paper, urban electric street lighting, the first public ‘penny’ flush toilets (shoe-shine included) and the first ceramic toilet bowl, the first rail tunnel under a major river (Thames). Also the theory of light as an electromagnetic wave, the discovery of Neptune, dinosaur hunters, the germ theory, the use of antiseptics and sterilized equipment, the use of ether and chloroform in hospitals, the first register of qualified doctors, the world’s first World Exhibition and Fair, and the world’s first jelly babies.
Sneezing at nothing; simply rejecting the ‘Golden Age’label as hysteria.
The last words are the unconscious mantra; representing the preening conceit and overweening hubris of moderns, who actually believe we are superior to the wise of Antiquity, as well as those who came after them.
Why so? Presumably, because we have more stuff!!!!!
In the 12th century Bernard, Archbishop of Chartres, looked back and asserted, “We are trivial dwarves, who see as far as we do, only because we can stand on the massive shoulders of the Giants of of the past.”
They were followed by the Scholastics of the High Middle Ages, natural philosophers who were the first formal Scientists, among them Brahe and Copernicus. Then came the Men of the Renaissance, including Machiavelli and Michelangelo; followed by the English Whigs, such as Berkeley, Hume and Locke.
The catalyst for modernism was the French Enlightenment which inflicted every idiotic religious heresy on Europe; among them Albigensianism and Jansenism as well as the pernicious secular heresies of libertarianism and progressivism, the latter the spawn of Marxism.
At the end of the day we can thank the likes of Diderot, Rousseau, St.Just and Voltaire for the blather we label modern politics.
Fair enough and duly noted. For the record, I’m hardly disparaging creativeness at any level; simply asserting that modern achievement pales in comparison to the past.
Consider that in 330 BC:
* Euclid defined a point in a space and then a second point somewhere else in that space; separated horizontally.
* Next he defined an infinite number of points between the first two, creating a line.
* Next he defined points from the end points of the horizontal line, creating two vertical lines.
* Then he defined points horizontally from the end points of the vertical lines, creating a second horizontal line.
Now he had a rectangle or square, a 2-dimensional shape!
This definition can be extended, in space, to create a prism or cube, a 3-dimensional shape; and so on to include all the other geometric forms.
Euclid defined shape, the basis for structure, which we take for granted and w/o which we would likely still be living in caves. And just reflect a moment; he managed to achieve this w/o a college degree!!!
My starting point was direct and simple. We moderns preen w/the conceit that we are the greatest ever; which is bullshit way past the 10th power. Proof? Look at the world around us since the French Enlightenment.
I”ll see your Euclid and raise you Stonehenge. The English had geometry down about 2200 years before Euclid was born ;)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/stonehenge-builders-had-geometry-skills-to-rival-pythagoras-834313.html
http://www.stonehenge.tv/geometry.html
I think advanced thinking has been around since the first cooperative defense farm settlements allowed for some leisure time. Environmental catastrophe, epidemics, social constraints on free thought, invasions or war where every library was burned, all contribute to wiping out the knowledge base; the wheel has to be reinvented again and again and again from the ashes. England in the 1800s and America in the 1900s made great strides under an environment of free thought, just as Greece did in its time, and likely will again.
Hm........ April Fools Day passed more than 100 days ago.
In 2500 BC, civilization was cantered in the Mesopotamian Cradle among the Akkadians, Babylonians and Persians;
England and Englishmen didn’t exist and Stonehenge, whatever its merits, has never reminded anyone of the Parthenon.
The Internet, while a useful tool, is the spawn of every absurd and crack-pot nostrum that man can conjure up. Then instantly circulated w/o review or reflection by that gatekeeper of knowledge, truth and wisdom; the media, eternally needy of attention. Beyond ridiculous.
She had like nine kids and had all the John Brown rumors. Hard to do that be a sexless old hag.
If you don’t like Stonehenge of 2,200BC, maybe Maeshowe in Scotland of 2,800BC or Newgrange in Dublin, Ireland of 3,200BC (both winter solstice) or Brynn Celli 4,000BC (summer solstice) is more to your liking? Newgrange reflects the same advanced engineering, architectual and astronomical knowledge, complete with a shining white fascade, corbelled roof, and a light show to rival the oldest pyramid - which it predates, btw. How could Newgrange be built other than by a comfortable stratified civilization supported by agriculture and tied to a common cause by ordered customs?
Persians used to survey large areas using acoustic means. So did the Druids, according to Julius Ceasar. The pyramids are aligned intentionally. How can we then dispute that Stonehenge, Newgrange, and hundreds of other sites with observatories, monoliths and dolmans were not also intelligently aligned? Knowing the stars is knowing how to navigate. And knowing the stars involves higher thinking than some wandering savage running around with a club looking for a rodent to eat.
Greece had an advantage being close to three developing civilizations so that ideas and texts could be shared and preserved even through disasters. And there was a neverending labor pool - labor being the biggie. Maybe the eruption of Helka or Laki or some other natural catastrophe brought about the collapse of agriculture and knowledge in the North or maybe it was biological. But it’s indisputable the English have been around as long, if more isolated, and if only traces of their advanced knowledge remain just as only traces of many civilizations remain.
Sometime in ancient history, large groups of genetic A111T babies jumped out of the ME/India cradle, ran to distant shores, and developed ordered civilizations. The Tree of Knowledge wasn’t just a tree. Man was much more intelligent, in many more places than we give him credit for, including northern europe and England.
I never asserted that the spirit of inquiry which produced knowledge and wisdom only commenced w/the Greeks. In fact it likely began in the Garden of Eden, when Man grasped that he needed his wits to survive.
My core point was direct and simple.
Greece and Rome were the wellsprings for Western Civilization, as such historians as Gibbon and Von Ranke have affirmed.
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