Dr John Dee

That's akin to heresy on this thread, dieter. There are some things up with which we will not put, as your hero Winston once said.

You've got too much time on your hands, daisy, but well picked up. Also seems they well and truly trump New Zealand (following the Croats in NZ link), being responsible for anyone who's anyone in that country as well, including several All Blacks. Most of those associations are at best nominal, or probably more accurately fanciful. Interesting what can be done with this sort of exercise.

I think maybe you should read dieter's post again.

I don't know whether the Croatians outdo the New Zealanders in laying claim to people and achievements from elsewhere but it probably says enough that they never seem to have noticed Steiner.

Not sure how many ways you think a hair can be split, daisy, but this isn't one of them. If you check, you'll find that Biffin claimed Steiner was Croatian. He wasn't, he was Austrian. He identified as Austrian. Steiner may have been born in Croatia but he spent not much more than a year there, if that. He might have been entitled to a Croatian passport since the kingdom was able to issue these but I suspect you'll have great difficulty in demonstrating that he ever had one. The only issue is (as it was before) that once again Biff's been having a lend of history.

Sorry dieter, no insult intended. I only meant that the empire (as empire) was pointless, being as it was a series of political settlements called an empire and serving only to prop up the Habsburgs for another 50 years or so. Its cultural contributions can't be denied although Mozart and Schubert might be stretching the point since they were born well before 1867. And never mind Mahler. Check out Alma Mahler's 'career' some time. She seems to have slept with most of Vienna. Happy for you to claim Kafka. I wouldn't trade him for a thousand Kiplings. And if you really want to boast you could add Robert Musil. Extraordinary writer.

I don't mean to be pedantic or anything, but Steiner was Austrian, a citizen of that other pointless empire, the Austro-Hungarian. Some people, including the bloke with the toothbrush moustache, didn't think that distinction meant much, though.

Very pleasing that you have arrived in Vietnam without harm, Biff. You don't mention, though, whether you caused any on the way. My sister was there a few years ago and loved it. She's always talking out of turn. I expect your bad French to continue. It's our historic duty to offend against the language, especially wherever we find the remnants of their failed colonial enterprises. I won't venture anywhere near the bad Dong puns. I presume you'll return with at least six months' supply of these. If not, you could bring back a stick-on Uncle Ho beard for BBO to wear to the first game of the season.

Looks like they do things a little differently in England: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jan/11/manchester-city-charged-anti-doping

Hmm, this looks suspiciously like posting by proxy, another clever effort by BBO to slip past any scrupulous mods who might visit here. That's highly unlikely I suppose. More alarming is the information that he's been allowed to teach anyone anything. I though proponents of Dickensian education techniques had been shuffled off into administrative jobs long ago. Anyway, didn't you say in another thread that you were off for a souvlaki at lunchtime yesterday?

When you can come up with some evidence for you claim that I called you a racist feel free to get back to me. As for the rest of this tripe it only confirms that you react to posts without bothering to read them.

I don't disagree ... except for the proposition about tu quoque argument. Biff's assertions wander backwards and forwards over all sorts of justifications for/glossing over/ whitewashing of western barbarism. He's relied all along on reading Islam through a comparative moral lens and in those circumstances it's entirely appropriate to raise barbarities of other sorts. Nor do I think that there's anything like a 'pizzing competition' to it. That's why I said barbarism is barbarism. Giordano Bruno's death would still be an act of barbarity with or without the Inquisition's subsequent expansion in Spain and beyond. It's the extremism of Biff's language that worries me.

I haven't concerned myself with race at all, veiled or even hidden and if all you've got is accusations framed at that level you demean yourself even more than you have already. But pat yourself on the back as much as you like about whatever victory you think you've achieved. I wasn't aware that there was any competition going on but there you go. When I want a history of the Levant i'll ask the historians.

I thought it was as well but Jack obviously left it with a request to leave James Hird alone for the time being. I guess Alan Hird's stirring things up is a separate enough issue and should be able to be discussed that way but if it turns back onto James and his problems it might need to be shut down.

That is my point daisy. Biffen is carrying on endlessly about the barbarity of the Ottomans or whatever other category he chooses to use to calumniate Muslims (in their entirety) and in order to do so he's also endlessly whitewashing European interferences in the rest of the world let alone the massacres, pogroms, genocides and so on at home. There is no vantage point of moral superiority on which to stand. The complexity of the history that leaves us where we are today needs to be accepted as such before anything is likely to be solved. Simplistic cause and effect relationships and caricatures/stereotypes/generalisations etc are the stuff of propaganda. I'd have thought better of Biff than to trade in them.

As I've said there really isn't any point trying to argue with the jumble of claims that are spread over your various posts on this thread. There's also no point in holding any conversation with someone who doesn't actually bother reading what I've said. The New World was the Americas. you turned the point into something to do with the Crusades. Now you're trying to advance some justification for what you've said by pointing out that the New World was the Americas. And the Iron Maiden as mere stylistics. Yeah, right. Barbarism is barbarism.

You're getting hysterical Biff. Most of this isn't worth bothering about. All I'll comment on is the bolded bits: (i) I made no such link. Actually, nor did daisy, he was commenting on links between the Inquisition and deaths in Spanish colonies; (ii) I don't know what you've destroyed other than any semblance of logic and coherence, not that you displayed much of that in the first place. Why don't you submit your rantings to a refereed history journal and see what they think of your mythoclastics? If you want to read anything I've said as 'defending Islam' I can't stop you but you obviously haven't got a clue.

I don't know that playing the numbers game helps all that much, daisy, since the west wins that one hands down every day. My point was about barbarism itself and the Inquisition was a particularly barbarous form of expression of the Counter-Reformation because of its methodologies, which weren't so much about killing Jews and Moslems but using torture and execution as ways of suppressing entire populations. Burning people alive was particularly horrific and I don't really think that whether or not the Spanish executed less people than the Ottomans killed in the Balkans or anywhere else eases the burden of barbarity on the former. I know you haven't argued that but your comment feeds Biff's obsession, which does rely on drawing moral ratios.

If by Christians you mean the Inquisition, they also had some pretty legendary forms of torture. Trials, where they were necessary (and they were only necessary when it had already been decided to execute someone), were only to rubber-stamp confessions already extracted.

We're completely in the dark about the new satellite and it doesn't seem to have helped ease the load on the existing one. We have outage after outage, only some of them planned. Assuming the wet arrives soon we'll probably need to connect to the web via semaphore. Hope you're right 'bub. Will we have to rely on Telstra to get it working though?

The more things change the more they go backwards, daisy. We get by jumping from satellite to a Telstra mobile broadband service to using an iPhone as a hotspot. But there was a 7:30 report thing a while ago on a bloke who has to put his iPhone in a plastic bag and hoist it up a tree to get any sort of internet so I can't complain (and no one would listen anyway). Good to know that things are moving so fast in the metropoli though.

What's that thing about doing unto others? I tend to prefer that direction. First anyway. Have been enjoying myself of late poking feathers at Crusader Biffin and reading about nineteenth century s-x crimes in Vienna. No connection of course.

Not at all. Read Toby Green's Inquisition if you want a sense of the scale of the Inquisition's barbarities. That's one of the problems with trying to implicate only one religion or Empire.

Not quite true Biff. The inquisition accompanied the Spanish (in particular) to the New World where it was used widely as a tool of repression against native populations.

But that’s exactly what they thought they could take on, Biff; see the Balfour Declaration. I’m not sure where your obsession with the Ottoman Empire actually leaves us. There really isn’t any denying the various genocides (well, the Turks go on trying to with the Armenian genocide but no one believes them and it was only one of several to boot). But many of your claims about their contributions or otherwise to knowledge etc are contestable at best and probably mostly falsifiable with a bit of research. You seem to muddle together what’s Ottoman and what belongs to the ‘Golden Age’ or other previous caliphates anyway, and you also ignore the Islamic contributions from elsewhere (the Moors, for example, especially in Spain and we know how that ended or if we don’t we really ought to read more about the Inquisition). But there’s no real point to most of your contumely other than as an effort to condemn anything and everything associated with Islam. Islam, though, isn’t a singular, monolithic thing (as the Shi’a will tell you in between dodging bullet or cleaning up after suicide bombers) but the obsession with the Ottomans looks like an attempt to paint all Islam with the same brush. In any case – as the Balfour Declaration also indicates – the history of the Levant more or less begins again from 1918, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Versailles and (in relation to British territories) the Cairo Conference of 1921 when Europeans thought they could divide up bits of land and put them in the hands of people who didn’t necessarily have territorial claims to them. It’s easy enough to say that all of this was done with the best intentions in mind but it certainly didn’t work out that way and it’s the repercussions of all that manipulation (as well as the way in which western countries then pursued their own interests in the region) that we’ve inherited. The Arabs (or plenty of them who were disadvantaged as a result) saw these deals and agreements between Europeans as a betrayal right from the start, especially of the Arab Revolt which had helped bring down the Ottomans (the Arab Revolt was that thing that in Seven Pillars T.E. Lawrence laid claim to having orchestrated/led or been the hero of, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that you read that book since Lawrence makes it clear whom he regards as the real barbarians once the Empire’s forces reach Damascus). So none of the European plans and borderlines got off to a good start and things didn’t improve from there. As for Islam, any remnants or resonances from the Ottomans are far less significant in relation to the current malignant face of fundamentalism than the Wahhabists. The real problem (in terms of terrorism especially) lies in Saudi Arabia. But we go on dealing with them with one eye closed, or maybe both. That’s a far more urgent question than what the Ottomans did or didn’t do with the Astrolabe or the number zero … although the nineteenth century origins of the fundamentalism as a response to the values and attitudes of those European who were stomping around the place but whom you hold in such esteem is another matter. As Walter Benjamin once said: ‘there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.