Group items tagged

The Spanish Inquisition is commonly associated with torture, cruelty and oppression

The concept of inquisitions to root out religious heretics was not novel when, in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV authorised the creation of a Spanish inquisition

These newly united kingdoms, under joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to set up such a body

Philip II was a loyal son of the Catholic Church

Philip's sense of religious mission crucially shaped foreign and imperial policy

It was the 1590s before the Inquisition managed to extend its control over printed materials beyond Castile to the rest of Spain, and any resourceful person with a taste for suspect literature could obtain prohibited texts from Italy, France, and the Low Countries

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting.  Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.

Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.

they learned to follow their curiosity

Hercules for his brave struggle with the hydra of the Inquisition

With him in charge of the government, Charles was able to get into his stride as an enlightened despot: schools were founded to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Jesuits; the currency was reformed; a census was taken; and Madrid became, for the first time, a city worthy of Europe

He did not like it, but he believed that the Spaniards wanted it, and the events of 1766 had taught him the danger of offending national prejudices

Charles was the first child of Philip V’s marriage with Isabella of Parma. Charles ruled as duke of Parma, by right of his mother, from 1732 to 1734 and then became king of Naples

he became king of Spain and resigned the crown of Naples to his third son, Ferdinand I

Charles III was convinced of his mission to reform Spain and make it once more a first-rate power

Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

Republicans are going to nominate a candidate who talks complete nonsense on domestic policy; who believes that foreign policy can be conducted via bullying and belligerence; who cynically exploits racial and ethnic hatred for political gain.

But that was always going to happen, however the primary season turned out. The only news is that the candidate in question is probably going to be Donald Trump

is he more fraudulent than the establishment trying to stop him? Not really.

Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire

In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain

In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain

remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive

The islands may be said to have European status not only because from the age of Queen Elizabeth to that of Napoleon they were involved in quite as many wars, rivalries and conflicts as were the great powers of the Old World themselves. The Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and, for a brief moment

Unlike the Spaniards, the British understood from the beginning the importance of a numerous and agile merchant navy

Two features distinguished the reforms of Charles III (the “Caroline” reforms) from those of the early Bourbons. First, Charles was a “reformer’s king” in that he consistently supported reforming ministers.

After 1714 Spain experienced a gradual economic recovery, which became quite marked in the second half of the 18th century.

Charles III maintained that the key to Spain’s prosperity lay in the development of an American market in the Indies. He saw clearly that Spain alone could not preserve an overseas market closed to the outside world against Britain.

If power is to be delivered to the technocrats, it has to be taken away from someone else. For Vermeule, that someone is the judiciary.

Judges, in his view, are ill-equipped to adjudicate on the administrative and regulatory questions that, in modern states, so often come across their desks. Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.

The abnegation of the law opens the door for the executive branch to assert its proper role. This has been the grand theme of Vermeule’s collaborations with Sunstein and Posner. His writings with Sunstein have focused on the need for government agencies to have wide leeway to intervene in and regulate the social order, without serious oversight from the legislature or the Constitution.

Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.

His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.

there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.

Rutgers officials willing to talk openly about their opposition to the students’ demands have said that the school, as a public institution, has a greater obligation to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment right to free speech.

The head of the journalism department at Central Michigan University was fired last year after using the same slur when quoting from a lawsuit. An Emory University law school professor was placed on administrative leave for more than a year after using the word in discussions with students about race.

Any public use of a racial epithet can carry a risk of steep professional consequences.

This nation’s empirical and inquisitive Founders considered information conducive to improvement, which is one reason the Constitution mandates a decennial census.

And why James Madison soon proposed expanding the census beyond mere enumeration to recording other data. Today, the census provides an ocean of information indispensable to understanding this complex society. And it determines the disbursement of $1.5 trillion annually from the federal government.

The 14th Amendment, which stipulates the enumeration of “the whole number of persons,” elsewhere uses the term “citizens.” So, by “persons” the amendment’s authors denoted a broader category. The Supreme Court has held that in this amendment “persons” refers to the “total population,” including immigrants, “whatever” their “status under the immigration laws.”

Pocahontas was a Native American woman born around 1595. She was the daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan, the ruler of the Powhatan tribal nation, which at its strongest included around 30 Algonquian communities located in the Tidewater region of Virginia

Pocahontas was named Amonute at birth and went by the name Matoaka. She supposedly earned the nickname Pocahontas, which means “playful one,” because of her happy, inquisitive nature.

and made a spectacle of him in front of several Powhatan tribes before taking him to meet Chief Powhatan.

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

One of the hallmarks of our current time is that simple truths can often sound like radical dissent. To declare that “lying is wrong” in response to a grotesque falsehood is to invite an avalanche of whataboutism. Say that “political violence is evil,” and you’ll quickly be challenged to take sides and declare whether right or left is worse.

It’s not that people disagree with those statements, exactly. It’s just that granting their full truth carries uncomfortable implications.

Here’s another simple truth: Character matters

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history, with his work winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. A new book examines Pope Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.

Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.

The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.