However not for former supply teacher Mike Stuchbery, who somehow manages to come out of exchanges with them looking just as foolish with his awfully smug abuse laden supposed “historical smackdowns” that prove little but his ability to skim read Wikipedia.
For instance see this irrelevant reply to a tweet here. “Your ancestors traded white slaves to Baghdad” which is followed by a thread mentioning some Islamic trinkets from centuries ago. What exactly has slave trade and some trinkets centuries ago got to do with a complaint that a country is changing in a way someone dislikes?
(As a sidenote it is amusing Peter Sweden bemoans “my culture” considering his anti-Semitic, homophobic, and tradlife misogynistic views would fit in nicely in Saudi Arabia.)
Here is another example: “is this a 15th-century French noblewoman or a 21-century Muslim woman from Luton?” Again what is the point? We should stop being bothered by niqabs in the UK as you found a picture of a veiled woman from over 500 years ago?
Then there is this attempt at a “historical smackdown” that inadvertently just simply backs up what the guy is saying.
This is a theme from Stuchbery’s tweets. A reply of “hey dickhead, in 1567 whites/Western country did this, PS get fucked” to whatever bad thing some far-right person is complaining about.
Here he is for example (in response to it being mentioned by some far-right account) on honour killings, a specific type of violence more common today within South Asian or Middle Eastern families, which he falsely conflates with domestic violence and homicide solely so he can say “whites do it too!”. There may be instances where that has happened, but saying “Honour-killing? Roman & Jewish culture allowed husbands to murder adulterous or disobedient wives” or Anne Boleyn’s death “could be described as an honour killing” is an utterly worthless point to make.
Firstly, no Anne Boleyn is not equivalent to cases such as Banaz Mahmod and Samia Shahid or others you read about from places like Pakistan (think you will find it was not Anne Boleyn’s own siblings and parents plotting to kill her for who she married). Also secondly, this is such a pathetic childishly tribal take on a serious issue. Those suffering from honour based violence today are not likely to find much comfort in being compared to the wives of Henry VIII.
Unsurprisingly whilst he notes names such as “Democratic People's Republic of Korea” may not be perfect descriptors he cannot say the same for Antifa cretins, who he compares to WW2 heroes and praises their thuggish violence. Even Trevor Noah could strongly condemn those idiots.
He’s also pro punching Nazis, and doesn’t care even if innocent people get hit in the crossfire. And supports teachers’ pushing their politics on 10 year olds (or at least as long as it’s politics he agrees with like Donald Trump being Hitler).
(Another sidenote: Stuchbery says he lives in Luton, which is notably home to Amjen Choudary and his Al Muhajiroun crew, the hardcore Salafist Luton Islamic Centre, and Britain First on their “Christian Patrols”. Has the Twitter coward who applauds thugs and cries “punch them, punch them, never stop punching them” ever dared lay a finger on any of those people?).
For example another of his long threads compares the 50,000 Huguenot Protestants from France moving to England in the 16th century, to fears over large scale Islamic migration into Europe on the scale of over a million from failed states in the 21st century. Stuchbery says there are “many parallels” between the two, of course he neglects to mention the many obvious differences ...
He then rounds off the thread with this: “Anyhoo. Refugees? Asylum seekers? Nothing new under the sun. My Muslim neighbours in Luton work just as hard and contribute just as much. And if you somehow think that they're not assimilating... Dudes, they already took your damn biscuits”.
Somehow I find it doubtful those with concerns about large scale Muslim migration (who are also branded with a broad brush as all “xenophobic mouthbreathers” by Stuchbery) are likely to persuaded otherwise by pointing to Luton of all places, or that integration there is all going fine because a hijabi won a TV baking show.
On the contrary, Stuchbery again just unwittingly made the best argument for immigration scepticism possible. There is not a single sane person in the UK who would point to Luton, often referred to as “the UK’s Most Radicalised Town” and linked to dozens of jihadist plots and far-right rampages, as a good example of successfully well integrated Muslim migration.
If he thinks that then great for him, but brushing over problems in places like Luton, and claiming everything there is just going swimmingly is as misleading as what you might see from the far-right. The right response to Fox News exaggerating is to call out and correct them, not to simply point at an exaggerated or false claim and then use that to just merrily deny real problems in order to portray everything “multicultural” as all hunky dory. This is just rancid dishonesty and denialism.
Nevertheless Stuchbery’s shtick has quickly become a Twitter favourite for some on the Left in particular churnalists at clickbait outlets looking for low effort articles. However you suspect though this is largely down to the awful people he has positioned himself against as his actual arguments are utterly terrible and unlikely to impress anyone beyond an echo chamber of those already sold on the “multicultural” bromides of a Justin Trudeau.
Rather like one stares at a pile-up on the other side of the motorway, I’ve watched Mr. Stuchbery over the last couple of weeks. I suppose one should acknowledge that he spotted a niche - the ‘what about the Crusades’ irrelevant response - and adapted his classroom powerpoint to the twitter add photo. Still, there is nothing in his responses which isn’t depressingly predictable. You think that’s a bad thing? Look at this bad thing over here.
ReplyDeleteIt’s true that MS goes after the lowest hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge. But his conspiracist interlocutors are generally making claims about what is happening now. The man just isn’t equipped with the knowledge to counter them. If they want to discuss Swedish sexual offences trends, both sides need to have established that they view data as the beginning of the conversation. Neither side gives that impression: the Peter Sweden side because …well, he’s bonkers and MS because he patently can’t imagine that a minority group can be more likely on average to have rotten ideas (as Bertrand Russell warned).
MS’s ideology moreover is deeply confused, occasionally extolling the civilizing effects of the Enlightenment while, Francis Collins-like, ascribing his Catholic revelation of Christ’s saving grace in a chance meeting up a German berg with a life-size wooden crucifix. It is palpable that he is itching to create a thread extolling the largely mythical Islamic Golden Age – he already has had an abortive attempt at the chimerical Golden Age in al-Andalus, after which he evidently realized that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
If instead, he did the work and argued not by historical analogy, but on the facts of today and with any conception of how beliefs really do have consequences, he might get to the meat of an argument. Imagine him as Counsel for the Defence and Paul Joseph Watson as the prosecution.
PJW: Your Honour, this...now!
MS: Your Honour, that...then! I rest my case.
His Honour: In the absence of a reasonable defence, I find for the prosecution.
MS is a terrible advocate.
He is also a terrible "historian".
ReplyDeleteInfact... he's not a true Historian.
A professional Historian is a person who studies and writes about the past, and is regarded as an authority on it.
REAL historians have a commonly recognized set of standards of practice as well as governing associations and societies.
All manner of amateurs and quasi-‘professionals’ can and do lay claim to the more generic title ‘historian’.... just like MS, notably encouraged by The Guardian.
The acknowledged standard among scholarly, Academic Historians themselves for determining whether or not a person is indeed a genuine ‘Historian' is as follows:
1. The individual almost always has some amount of formal training in history, historical research techniques, and historiographic methodologies. That is, the individual has been trained to some extent in the basic facts of history as a sequence of human events, and in how to seek out and make proper use of source material, and in how to critically analyze the information gleaned from that source material... to transform the results into an objective and well-written piece of scholarship. This training most often involves a university degree in specifically history, as opposed to (for example) journalism, literature, or education. Ideally that degree will be a doctorate.
2. Another way to distinguish the relative quality of a person’s claim to be a genuine ‘Historian’ is through that person’s publishing record. This has nothing to do with volume of sales, however. Sometimes the very worst historians, in the generic sense of that term, have huge volumes of sales while the very best scholarly and academic historians may have only very limited sales. Rather, one must look at the nature of the publishing house itself. Historians of the scholarly and academic variety usually publish the majority of their work through academic presses and publishing houses, often directly affiliated with a university, such as Oxford University Press.
Writing in the Guardian and being addressed as a 'historian' does not automatically make MS one.
FAKE!!
Cassie
I agree that Stuchbery is a dick. His own literary agency told me they disassociate themselves from his views and that he has never published a single book. I just wish you didn't feel the need to diss PJW and Peter Sweden to prove how even handed you are.
ReplyDelete