Don’t you hate it when the Prusso-Hibernian herd scores cheap debate points with outwardly technically correct but inwardly psychologically false arguments?

I’m glad he eventually found a more productive outlet for his psychopathy.

Nasty stuff. But is it as nasty as the real world US policy in WWI? Is there any way we could argue the US didn’t come to the rescue of the English? Was it really because of people like Lovecraft?

Yeah, you can’t get more English than William the Conqueror and William III, and you can’t get less German or Irish than William Herschel (born in Hanover) and Robert Boyle (born in Lismore). But I admit to being stumped by who the poets Young and Thomson are, which just shows that I’m probably not English enough for Lovecraft, even though I was born in Sussex.

Boyle was never knighted. (Neither, technically, was Herschel, though no fault for missing it). The Civil War parallel is interesting to see. The opinions are dismal but the language is impressive in its floridity.

– as WE – all German-American-Native Indians very well know ”that the genuine native stock for England’s cause” is actually ”German” – at least the most important ”stock” – THE Royals -(Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha) – and so the whole pretension to be ”British” is as much a swindle as ”Trumps” pretention that he is ”an American” -(and not the documented ”German” – who loves to read ”the Führers” book) – ”the unpatriotic disaffection of those working in behalf of England’s enemies” is actually the typical attitude of self-hating Germans – who are NOT allowed to live out their ”Germaness” – which doesn’t matter much as what did the (really) GREAT Wovoka -(as a real ”American Native”) predict?

When the Indian Messiah arrives the earth will open up and swallow ”the White Man” – entirely with fake American Firsters and Brexiters alike…

magistra
The first ‘English poet Young’ turned up by my Web search is Edward Young, born 1683, died 1765, best known for the poem Night-Thoughts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Young
I find three poets called James Thomson, one who was born in 1700 and died in 1748, one who was born in 1763 and died in 1832, and one who was born in 1834 and died in 1882, all three (pleasingly) not English but Scottish: I hope it was the earliest who was meant, as he wrote the words of Rule, Britannia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Thomson_(poet,_born_1700)

A thing that strikes me is the way he uses the expression ‘native American’, as an indicator of how usage has evolved over the last nine decades.

Phew, magistra, thanks, I thought that not knowing who Young and Thomson were was a sign of my unique ignorance. Can anyone identify them?

Is HP Lovecraft the worst writer that serious readers tolerate?

By not the most offensive thing Lovecraft wrote. Lovecraft may be the indefensible writer that is widely excused if not defended.
I enjoy some of Lovecraft, but a lot of his early stuff is pretty awful.
A great deal of the sense of dread and ancient
evil in his work is driven by his fear and loathing of “degenerate” foreigners and immigrants.

Well, kidneystones, people usually argue that Richard III was the last English monarch. But really, joking aside, the current lot are English through and through. Under other circumstances we wouldn’t, I hope, put up with the line that ‘your family are immigrants so you aren’t really English’, and the immigration was over 300 years ago

You haven’t experienced the true power of lovecraft until you’ve read it in the original welsh.

… I read once that the irish word for “black person” was literally “blue”, black already being used to refer to hair.

22@ Mary of Teck? if we’re talking about mothers. The problem for English purists is that you’re quite right, there’s plenty of non-English blood mixed in.

Few Scots consider Scotland England just as fewer Irish consider themselves Welsh, or English. So, even with a looser definition the Scottish Stuart males, more or less, have to be ruled out if for no other reason than their general love of all things non-English – especially absolutism. Certainly the Plantagenet kings based in Europe don’t exactly fit the mold. Richard CÅ“ur de Lion spent about 6 months total in England. The Tudors are a better fit, but there’s some question about their Welsh origins. William of Orange? The Hanovers? Pretty strong German roots, I’d say. Then, when we factor in Doggerland, the whole never-conquered island race thing gets a bit blurry, doesn’t it.

I’m a fan of the English and of Englishness because of Monty Python, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and Spitting Image. I enjoy the literature immensely. Having a good laugh at the royal family will get one slapped in jail, or worse, in some cultures. So, there’s that. And I agree, if one is born in England, or even moves there – one can be as English as one likes.

My favorite monarch?

Bertie – son of Queen Victoria and the first modern monarch.

In the current reactionary mythology of America, there once was a city shining upon the hill, the land of the Pilgrims, Godly men ripe in freedom. Then, somehow that all went away, and the degenerate ages began. As of this moment, the wickedness that infected this once Holy Land is attributed to, well, various causes.* But back in the earlier times, the moral degeneration was held to be from the beer-swilling (often *Catholic*) Germans and the barbarous Irish, slaves of the Pope every one. I believe Lovecraft was repeating this old slander, which only seems novel because of historical amnesia.

Not only were Normans part of the British “race,” the Dutch influence, such as it was, was part of the British empire. It’s not clear which William of Nassau Lovecraft meant (or if he meant to allude to all?) but the two most prominent choices are William the Silent, the most heroic leader of the revolution against Catholic Spain. But maybe he meant William III, the triumphant monarch who put paid to the Catholic restoration of James II, and opened the glorious history of Whiggish empire. The real moral here I think is that racial and religious bigotry may be conceptually distinct in the minds of philosophers who want to condemn the one while conveniently ignoring the other. But in real life, they are not so distinct.

Lovecraft’s life of fear seems to have done him far more harm in his personal life, which as I understand it was terribly withdrawn. Somehow I tend to see his racism as a terrible neurotic symptom. Woodrow Wilson, segregationist, was never so crude as Lovecraft. Yet, Woodrow Wilson, savior of the English, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires, did I think vastly more harm to peoples of color than the rancid non-fiction of Lovecraft.

*Currently the fall from grace is attributed to the Sixties, which is supposed to mean the sexual revolution, despite the common experience of most of the country that happened in the Seventies (which implies attacks on the Sixties are disguised attacks on integration); Roe v. Wade; the mysterious profusion of cultural Marxism in universities (which seems to mean anguish at the rise of everyday indifference to acceptable religion…and no, “spirituality” doesn’t count for the committed religious bigot); the rise of the Clintons (the tone was set by the moral panic over gays in the military); the socialist Obama (which refers primarily to the melanin in his skin as near as I can tell). The indissoluble mingling of racial and religious bigotry as motivating feelings is repeated in the national biography as well as Lovecraft’s, I think.

The politically committed will find original sin in the way Lincoln destroyed the Constitution (i.e., freed the slaves); in the Sixteenth Amendment; in the creation of the Federal Reserve; in the New Deal. Rolling back the New Deal has been the great political project of the right minded. Happily, the crusade against Communism (for empire) has provided the common ground to keep the political class together. But perhaps I’m just being offensively neurotic, like Lovecraft?

steven t johnson @ 25: “The indissoluble mingling of racial and religious bigotry as motivating feelings is repeated in the national biography as well as Lovecraft’s, I think. ”

Not so “indissoluble” in Lovecraft’s case; he got better before the end. (A year before he died, he wrote this to C.L. Moore, one of America’s first female SF writers.)

kidneystones @ 23: “… fewer Irish consider themselves Welsh, or English.”

The irony there being that the Irish enthusiastically participated in Welsh and English history long before the English returned the favor, e.g. that’s how St. Patrick wound up in Ireland to begin with. Leaving aside Scotland, there was and is Irish settlement up and down North West England (“In the 9th-11th centuries, … Norsemen from Ireland and Scotland began settling in the area”; Ireland is still today the fourth most common country of birth in the region), and Yorkshire on the east has a pack of place names due to Irish-Vikings.

Is HP Lovecraft the worst writer that serious readers tolerate?

Bret Easton Ellis wrote a bestseller about dismembering people.

Book of Durrow – apologies for this any other typos (on a bit of a deadline). The interested may wish to go directly to Googe images. Had some better links, can’t find them. Cheers.

kidneystones @ 32: “I’m not sure, however, that I’d go so far as to describe Scandinavian settlements in the area we call England and Wales as Irish.”

Would you call Dublin Irish? That’s a “Scandinavian [Viking] settlement”. Red hair? That’s a trait descended from the Vikings too, The Viking-settled Orkney Islands and Scottish peoples have it widely; but not so the very Celtic (but not so Viking-settled) Welsh and Cornish peoples.

@21,24

Well, since Norse-Irish connections have already been brought up, one may point out that black people were, in a sense, called ‘blue’ (blár) in Old Norse as well, except that the word itself could also denote black and/or colours close to black at the time (presumably a bluish shade of black, dark blue or something similar). Not only bruises, but even ravens and Hell itself were said to be ‘blue’. Again, the near-synonym ‘svartr’ was used for black hair and for demonic beings such as the devil.

Spam filter fail: https://crookedtimber.org/2017/09/08/dont-you-hate-it-when-the-prusso-hibernian-herd-scores-cheap-debate-points-with-outwardly-technically-correct-but-inwardly-psychologically-false-arguments/#comment-718054

Katsue @ 38: Yet in amongst those ‘Viking’ place-names in Yorkshire we find “Aireyholme” (originally “Erghum”) from the Old Irish word erg [a shepherd’s hut], “Carperby” from the Old Irish personal name Caipere, and “Melsonby” (Melsan’s farm/village) from a mixed Viking-Irish name. So they spoke enough Old Irish to use it for place-names, and had members with Old Irish names and with mixed-language names. Hm. Doesn’t sound entirely untouched by the Ould Sod, does it?

Katsue @ 42: The Normans had a very different approach, cf. the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny [which, quote, “ultimately helped to create the complete estrangement of the two ‘races’ in Ireland for almost three centuries”].

Of course by the 1640s you’d already had a break from that “Norman” monarchy (1066–1485) what with first the partly-Welsh Tudors displacing the Plantagenets, then in 1603 the Scottish Stuarts taking over after childless Elizabeth died, but in 1642 the English Civil War starting… ending the monarchy in 1649 with Charles II’s execution. The same year Oliver Cromwell made his name an eternal swearword in Ireland by committing genocide up and down that island, to assure there would be little assimilation.

Niall McAuley @ 44: You could refer to D👶🏼n💩ld J. T🐛👾🐍p as “Bavario-Caledonian”….