Jason Scott Montoya

“This is not to say that grooming gangs should be ignored — only that it’s almost always true that people care more about politics than about the suffering of women who have been assaulted or raped. “

“The same is true of his enemies, including the women who came forward. The Sunday Times report indicates that Brand’s new social media direction, a video channel whose content ranges from wellness to Covid and Net Zero “dissident” material, was a factor in inspiring several to speak out.”

“Be careful out there: for no one will care if you’re assaulted by a high-status sexual predator, except that predator’s political enemies.”

Here's a twitter thread that walks through the prison culture that permeates Russia. It's very much in line with the Roman way of things... Brute power and a victim hierarchy. In America, we elevate victims to the top. In Russia, they are the ground level of which all others stand.

"the true source of power is to suffer and that notion you know that to be a victim can somehow be a source of power is unbelievably subversive in the context of classical antiquity. You see all the time in the news at the moment that to cast yourself as a victim is somehow to give yourself power. And you would only have power by virtue of being a victim if you existed in the context of a society that was still in its fundamentals, Christian. In the Roman world if you said I'm victim they'd say yeah, and? I'll enslave you, or rape you, or do whatever." - Tom Holland

"It is one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in history that the symbolism of crucifixion said, "we run this world and if you get in our way we will rub you out". That is callous, brutal power. To have within 20 years, the crucifixion as a symbol of all conquering self giving love, that's just quite extraordinary." - NT Wright

“It was not just the extremes of callousness [of Romans] that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.

Why did I find this disturbing?

Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom.

Assumptions that I had grown up with - about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold - were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.”

"it's almost like an epistomological divide between a whole understanding of what is true, set of knowledge, which is contained within the more establishment viewpoint. And now this growing alternative world which refuses to accept what it is told by the mainstream media."