Bloomsbury is a Virginia Woolf reference.

She was the best of the Bilderberg Set.

It's where Doonesbury meets Bloom County.

I'm 25 miles from London, Ohio. Does that count as London-adjacent?

I'd love this. But I never know any bloomsbury pubs except the Lamb in Lamb's conduit Street. Or, if she's in the Virginia Woolf bit of bloomsbury, there are a couple of more restauranty places -- North Sea Fish comes to mind, and Casa Tua, a little Italian.

A couple of years ago we were staying in Bloomsbury and had excellent food at Pizza Sophia. It's very unfair that I'm not there still.

I don't really know Bloomsbury, either, although it is sort of walking distance from work. I've also been to the Lamb, which was fine.

I seem to remember the Yorkshire Grey being pretty nice. Unfortunately it's unlikely I will be free before 9.30 pm at the earliest...

All you need is a chippie, an off license, and a park where nobody calls the cops.

Unfortunately I'm having dinner with friends on Wednesday, so I won't be able to make it unless people plan to stay late, which seems unlikely on a weekday. I'm able to do so, however, as I have the week off.

Pub-wise, I can recommend the Lamb, and there's a good Italian place a few doors down if you want something restauranty. Otherwise, Bloomsbury-wise I like Bloomsbury Bowling, but I don't know if AWB is into bowling.

9: There is in fact a decent chippie nearby.

AWB stands for "Always Want to be Bowling".

GET THEM TO RHYME ON THE LINE THAT IS QUOTED

||

Asked whether [UK foreign secretary Jeremy] Hunt's threat of declining British-EU relations, or the Brexit secretary Dominic Raab's threat of the UK not paying £39bn in outstanding bills if trade talks stalled, were the kind of good manners usually associated of the British, [German foreign minister Heiko] Maas replied: "At the recent Nato summit I took part in bilateral talks with Mr Erdoğan and Mr Trump, so good manners are always relative."

That's got to be an enormous relief to May's cabinet, because I was thinking the public would blame the U.K. government.

I was thinking the public would blame the U.K. government.

I'm not sure we have one of those.

That looks like a vote for the lamb, then.

Howdy all! I was just walking past the Lamb in my wanderings today, and that would work out perfectly! I get ejected from the library where I'm reading this summer at 4pm, about 20 minutes away, so any time after that would be great. I haven't seen some of you in eight years, in addition to new folks who would have NO IDEA WHO I AM and no memory of all the salacious anecdotes I've told about my life!

What did you do to get ejected from the library? Spitting on other patrons?

I am working until 7, but should be at the Lamb about 7:45, or thereabouts. Wednesday.

See people there.

18: Cry on the 200-year-old documents I'm there reading? Nah, it just closes at 4. I think it's summer hours.

The Lamb at 745 Wednesday! Hooray!

20.1 cry, cry...

I'm sure most librarians have to kick out somebody for that every day.

Tears rejuvenate dry, cracked manuscripts. It's the conservator's dirty secret.

OK. I'll be at the Lamb earlier than 7:30, probably more like 6:00. Not sure if Ume is coming into London for this: we haven't discussed it in any detail.

If I can get away earlier, I might be a bit earlier, but I have a meeting that runs until 7pm, so it'll def. be after 7.

||
Has anyone else noticed this wonderful piece in the WaPo about the old racist biddies for Trump?

And there was Sheila Butler, who sat on the sixth pew on the right side, who said "we're moving toward the annihilation of Christians."

She was 67, a Sunday school teacher who said this was the only way to understand how Christians like her supported Trump.

"Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation," she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian -- allegations that are false. "He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."

"Obama woke a sleeping nation," said Linda.

"He woke a sleeping Christian nation," Sheila corrected.

Linda nodded. It wasn't just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.

"Unpapered people," Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. "And then the Americans are not served."

Love thy neighbor, she said, meant "love thy American neighbor."

Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the "legal immigrant stranger."

"The Bible says, 'If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,' " Sheila said, quoting Jesus. "But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border."

|>

As you were ....

I saw that. It's like a Flannery O'Connor character come to life. Or at least I imagine, having never read one of her stories.

I haven't been Christian going on 20 years, but that still pisses me off.

26: I had rather negative feelings about this comment on the story by WaPo WH reporter Josh Dawsey*:

The best journalism takes you some place and explains what makes people tick -- and their contradictions. Growing up in a southern church like this, it's hard to imagine a story capturing it better.

Just those wacky Southern bigots up to their antics again. What cut ups!

*He has not been the worst of the WH Stenographers but he has still been pretty lame. (And also a member of the ill-informed defensive crouch team on the HRC email coverage.)

It's implied that Jesus checked the papers of every leper he healed.

Did the Good Samaritan have a valid transit visa?

Christ himself wasn't a citizen. Not law-abiding, either.

26: The leaders of the Episcopal Church are speaking out against this stuff but we are so insignificant in terms of numbers it hardly matters. About 1 million of us. There were about 2 million in the 50's- when the population was much smaller.

I'm sure the Romans had a form for "Driving Money Changers From Temple".

Moses was pretty much an anchor baby.

34: That happens when you kick out the racists.

I know my Bible. "But Jesus said, 'Suffer, little children'."

Liberals ignore that.

Little children wouldn't want to go to him even if he let them.

That's why I have a staff.

Bishops aren't God. They're deputies.

26: I am shocked, shocked! to find religion being used to justify discrimination, oppression and racism.
("Your field hands, Mr President.")
Oh, thank you.

People used to have to put more effort into rationalizing it.

Vernacular services will do that. Lowers the standard.

26: I read that and had no idea at all as to whether it was excellent journalism or a filthy slur against the people being portrayed. Do you think that's really accurate? I mean, I don't know that it isn't, but wow.

Given how everybody voted, I would need a lot of convincing to buy "filthy slur."

Oh, 'filthy slur' is an overstatement -- if they voted for Trump, they're terrible regardless. But the loony Christian defense of treating immigrants badly is something I find surprisingly insane, and if I were told that it was invented by the writer I'd believe it.

Personally, I think the key is in the last line quoted, "But the least of these are Americans...." This is obviously nonsense from an empirical point of view, but about the only way to rationalize that view without going into the kind of open paganism that you see in some white nationalist stuff.

It strikes me as real because telling well-off white people that they are constantly under threat is basically "the news" if you watch Fox and is most of Trump's argument for everything.

In my long-lost evangelical days, I certainly heard the argument that when Jesus was quoted as saying "the least of these" this referred specifically to members of the Christian community, not unbelievers. It's not such a large step from there to "our own Christian community."

I'm not sure if I can make tomorrow or not - my choir is recording a track for an indie film made by our drummer, but if enough other altos will be there I can skive off.

49.1: I think that sort of argument is why there was so much effort spent to deny that Obama was a Christian. The scenario forced them to pick between dropping (some of their) racism, any pretense of Christian fellowship, or the facts. The facts didn't even stand a chance.

29. I haven't been Christian going on 50 years, but that still pisses me off.

34: I'm surprised there are so few Episcopalians. Is there any other case where the official/primary religion of the colonizer is so unpopular in the settler colonial state?

Anyway, yes, impossibly bad reading. No wonder these people can be manipulated into everything.

Have a great meetup. The Londoners I met were pretty cool.

Too many syllables. If they'd called themselves the Church of America they'd have everything.

52.1: You don't find many Korean Shintoists! One reason Christianity is so much more popular there than it is in Japan is because of its anticolonial associations.

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

53: It was a weird rebranding (especially given that they kept other very Britishy symbols, like the Episcopalian flag). Surprised they didn't snatch up "Church of Christ" while it was available.

54: Good point! But I was thinking more settler colonies. Almost all the ethnic Japanese were kicked out of Korea after the war, right?

56.2: I realized after posting that I'd misread you, sorry. Yes, there would have been very few Japanese left on the Korean peninsula after WW2.

But I was thinking more settler colonies.

I don't know actual demographic numbers, but the narrative I know of the seventeenth-century settlement of the American colonies is one of religious minorities, not predominantly C of E. (And of course areas that were German, or Dutch.)

Is there any other case where the official/primary religion of the colonizer is so unpopular in the settler colonial state?

Russian Orthodox Christianity in central Asia?

58 is how I always thought of it. Other people came late to America, but the influence of religious minorities was baked into the cake, so that the Constitution was written by largely by people who were against the idea of an established religion.

59: Limiting to settlers, per wiki Kazakhstan today is 20% Russian and 26% Christian. Am I being Eurocentric in thinking there just aren't that many settler colonies? US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay. White SA, white Algeria, Russian USSR, all in varying degrees of disappearance. Western Sahara, don't know if Moroccan religion is distinct. China, AFAIK never an established religion like the CoE was.

58: Oh, sure, there are _reasons_ for it, but it's still weird, possibly unique. And there were areas that were substantially Anglican; some of the colonies had Anglicanism as the state religion, especially the southern ones. Virginia definitely, maybe the Carolinas, and I think the Calverts were forced into being not-quite-so Catholic. Here in Pennsylvania we talk a lot about the influence of the Quakers and Penn's non-religious constitution because it was so unusual.

Given that I had oatmeal for breakfast, it's safe to say that the Quaker influence is still strong.

For the purposes of this argument I'd be willing to consider most/all of Latin America settler colonies--I think of Bolivia as being more indigenous than most, but isn't Evo Morales their first indigenous president? So the descendants of settlers must have held a lot of sway.

Anyway, it's not like we're talking about 5% or 10% of Americans being Episcopalian. It's less than 1/3 of a percent.

Everything about the developmnt of the US squeezes Anglicans out of the picture.

- colonies encouraging religious minorities like Quakers to come, along with Germans, Scotsmen, Scandinavians, etc., as a way of getting more settlers.
- colonies actively founded by religious minorities, ending up with New England colonies with enforced establishment churches that had been minorities (Congregationalist/Puritan) in England.
- colonies taken over from the French, Swedish, Dutch, etc. where the French, Swedish, Dutch were certainly not wiped out, they stayed in place.
- even in the colonies where the Crown planted an aristocratic class and an Anglican church structure (Virginia), resistance to having to pay taxes to support it was everywhere, just like resistance to all the other taxes.
- huge amount of Methodist evangelism starting very early in the history of Methodism.
- Episcopal missionaries seem to prefer converting The Benighted Heathens than converting other Christians for whatever reason.

"Episcopal" should be "Anglican" in the last point.

huge amount of Methodist evangelism starting very early in the history of Methodism.

That was always my dad's theory.

Good points, especially about Methodism. And we should probably add that in the 1800s, the Anglicans who did want to leave Britain had more attractive alternatives to head to. They'd prefer to stay in the empire at a much greater rate than, say, Irish Catholics.

Basically, instead of Anglicans we have Methodists. In every small town if there's a church that isn't evangelical, it's Methodist. Methodists are mainline but also evangelical. Methodists founded the Boy Scouts and tons of colleges. UMC is the biggest Christian denomination aside from Baptist and Catholic, and the traditional African-American churches are Methodist too but in their own structure.

There's a method to the madness.

64: If I'm counting US as settler I guess I have to count Brazil and the Caribbean countries (though for the latter majority slave populations complicates the question, at the least). AIUI all the mountain countries from Mexico to Chile are majority mestizo; white-dominated, yes, but very different to the Us, much less Australia, say.

Episcopal missionaries seem to prefer converting The Benighted Heathens than converting other Christians for whatever reason.

For the reason that they tend to think other Christians are Christian, which they see as the main point. A courtesy which isn't always reciprocated.

May be generalizing a tad. "In every small town" s/b "In every small town in Pennsylvania, New York State or Maryland in my experience"

In Nebraska, there were way more Methodists than evangelical people. There may have been more Jehovah's Witnesses in my town than actual Baptists.

Western Papua, Islam seems to match rest-of-Indonesia migrants pretty closely.

45: yes, I reckon this is just damn good journalism. I picked out the wackiest and most openly racist passage, but the rest of them just sound like people who believe Fox News, and who rationalise support for Trump with an absolute hatred of Hilary. (Who is, after all, a Methodist)

Mauritius!

Church of England which on the island is the Diocese of Mauritius in the Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean which has 2,788 members according to the census

||
Can everybody just agree that Israel and Turkey have both made some strong points and work from there?
|>

77: I'll take it! A useful useless fact to pull out the next time I'm at a bar and ruminating about random demographics data.

Thanks, everyone.

No, it wasn't! Britain was! Mauritius it is. The commonalities with the USA are left as an exercise for dalriata.

I'll have to write a story about a future hegemonic Mauritian Empire. Their emblem: a boot stamping on a dodo's face, forever.

who rationalise support for Trump with an absolute hatred of Hilary. (Who is, after all, a Methodist)

That is the thing I find maybe the weirdest and most religiously-discreditable thing about hard-right Evangelicals, as someone with no religious beliefs of my own. I can sympathize with someone who's going to get hostile on the basis of a sharp theological disagreement with someone else: if you actually are religious, it seems possible (not necessary, depending on the religion, but possible) that you think the disagreement is super important and that anyone believing the wrong thing is doing something seriously bad. And that seems sort of necessarily baked into some religions -- it's problematic, but it's not worse than being a believer in that sort of religion at all. But Baptists and mainline Protestants like Methodists are super, super close theologically, as I understand it -- the differences are all cultural and political.

At which point the 'religious' hostility to mainline Protestants who disagree with evangelicals politically seems incredibly dishonest; it's cloaking ordinary politics in the unassailability of religious belief.

Seriously, the Mauritian coat of arms has a dodo as a supporter, half blood red. That's hardcore.

82: but this is why religion is so useful for sharpening the contradictions. It elevates the narcissism of small differences into matters of high principle. This is part of my grand theory of why theology is at some periods of history *really important* -- it's because it generates heretics, and at times of shrinking resources, the gang that has the most cohesion and fanaticism wins. Seeing the world in terms of heretics and saved contributes to both qualities.

I see what they did with the palm trees there.

84: I am interested in your theory and would like you to elaborate with case studies.

|| UK politics question: In the probable but not guaranteed event that Ian Paisley is made to resign, and in the rather unlikely event that the DUP doesn't regain North Antrim in the by-election, how screwed is the government? |>

Wait, Ian Paisley is still alive? I thought he kicked the bucket a few years ago.

Ian Paisley the Younger.

Fuck, they made more?
I haven't been keeping up.

87: I'm not a UK person, but why the focus on Paisley? He seems to have the #3 safest seat of all the DUP. Presumably if his party, not just he, lost the seat, that would represent a crushing anti-DUP wave. Or is the question how much sway he personally has over the present Conservative/Unionist bargain?

I asked because he's likely to be kicked out of Parliament, and the margins are razor thin. If I'm counting it right, without him there's the same number of Conservative/DUP seats as everyone else. But that includes the speaker and Sinn Féin, so maybe that's not yet a concern for the government?

63 -- Someone needs to re-watch A River Runs Through It.

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to watch that once.

92 There is no way the DUP can lose North Antrim -- at least before Brexit starts to bite.

86: oh. I wrote, but never published, a lot on it about ten years ago. I'll see if I can dig it out again

95: Ahh, thanks. I figured that was most likely, but thought there could be a possibility that the lack of a Paisley (first time since the 60s), a corruption scandal, and anger--even among Brexiteers--over the way Brexit has been implemented might lead to people not voting or voting for the UUP.

Halford (a staunch Episcopalian himself) has had a lot to say in the archives about the history of American Episcopalianism, which is interesting and complicated.

96:I'd also be interested in reading that

98: One of the really interesting things about the Episcopal Church in the US is its governance structure at General Convention, a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies consisting of both clergy and lay members, mirroring the bicameral structure fo the U.S. Government. I believe that at the diocesan level I believe it's split between clergy and laity.
The 1789 convention at which the Church split from the Church of England, like the U.S. Constitutional Convention, was held in Philadelphia.

87: in theory a majority is 326; in practice, because of Sinn Fein, it's 320. At present the coalition has 317 Conservative plus 10 DUP.
And, as others have noted, North Antrim is a very solid DUP seat.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/

This might be relevant to the question of the link between poor education, stress and religion; "kak trevoga, tak do Boga", "as your troubles get worse, so you turn to God".

Reminder that we are meeting in The Lamb, on Lamb's Conduit Street. This evening, Wednesday.

With you in spirit.

I am wearing a green and white dress and will be there at 730!

Finishing up a call at work now, and then heading up. I guess sometime around 7:30-ish, too.

I will be a symphony in blue, accented by a red clammy face.

What shade of green?

What species of clam?

If it's the Atlantic Surfclam, I have thoughts.

A link to help you recognize ttaM.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Symphony-In-Blue-M-1/720911/3163637/view

There is a massive crowd outside the Lamb! I am standing next to the toy dispenser.

Here's ttaM in slightly better focus.

I know ttaM by sight, but not necessarily the others. We might have to find another spot?

I've met ttaM, he has both of his ears.

If he weren't such a music snob he could be far more recognizable.

I am here and have and a small table on the um right of the bar as you enter. The bar staff have deliquesced in the heat and move with the deliberation of sea cucumbers.

Oh. I see. For one I didn't double post, but zero post. In the event, ttaM and AWB met outside the pub and came in and found me. We had a really fascinating conversation on philosophy and for the world is fucked before I fled to catch a train.

I hope there was adequate food.

Sorry I couldn't make it in the end.

73: I think there are a fair number of Presbytereans elsewhere as well. I knew someone who was from Mississipi who went to an Episcopal church in Boston, because we don't have any Presbyterean churches in New England, being mainly Congregationalists.

The history of the Anglican-Episcopal Church in the USA is interesting. In 1800 there were essentially no Anglicans in the North, especially New England but also New York and Pennsylvania. And not that many in the South outside Virginia, since poorer whites very quickly became some variant of Baptist, and most of the Scotch-Irish were never Anglican to begin with. This held largely true until roughly after the Civil War, when the Episcopal church branded itself as the church for Northern Anglophile WASP gentry who were attracted to its latitudinarianism and ritual.

For example, JP Morgan's ancestors and parents were Puritans who would have been horrified if he became Anglican, but he did and so did most people in his social set. But this wasn't true only for people like Morgan -- lots of people switched. Now New England has tons of Episcopal churches and tradition but this all basically dates from 1850 onwards. This was also combined with a lot of evangelization and church founding (and school founding) so that there are a lot of Episcopal communities of African Americans and Native Americans and other groups. It's certainly not the most likely church to be in a very small town outside parts of the South, especially in the midwest (Anglophilia was less attractive to Germans than New Englanders) but in most places in the country even a small-ish town will have one Episcopal church. As going to Church stopped being a requirement for respectable life, and as WASPs have declined (and Church been less important to WASPs), and as the general problems affecting mainline Protestant churches have affected it, it has declined in total numbers, but been bolstered by (some) new people who like its openess, absence of culture war bullshit, and close connection to education.

120: Fascinating; I did look up to see what you said in TFA but that's a great summary.