TachyonTele

When you put all three parts of these memes together, what's the secret message?

Until the nineteenth century, the favourite ancient pagan gods in Western culture were those related to human qualities and activities. During that century, especially in Britain, attention switched to a horned divinity associated with the countryside and wild nature, usually personified as the Greek Pan. This lecture explores how and why this happened, and the impact on British culture, when the full subversive potential of this deity as a force for personal liberation became realised. It also shows how the image subsequently evolved from a classical god into an archetype.

This lecture was recorded by Ronald Hutton on 19th February 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

Ronald is the Gresham Professor of Divinity.

He is also Professor of History at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Learned Society of Wales.

Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).

Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.^___^

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said to reporters Tuesday that USAID had spent “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces; $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.” Those claims were picked up and spread widely on social media throughout the week.

Only the grant to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji was awarded by USAID. Its stated aim is to “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.”

The rest were awarded by the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

THE FACTS: Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by falsely saying it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law,” Trump said in Mar-a-Lago, adding on Wednesday in a post on social media: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

THE FACTS: Zelenskyy was elected to a five-year term in 2019, and the next presidential elections had been scheduled for spring 2024. But Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary or presidential elections during a state of martial law, so Zelenskyy has remained in office. He has said he believes elections will be held in Ukraine after martial law is lifted. The country would need to amend the law if it decided to hold a vote.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “The leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating.”

THE FACTS: Zelenskyy “retains a fairly high level of public trust” — about 57 percent - according to a report released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institution of Sociology, whose executive director is Anton Hrushetskyi.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “When you see what’s taken place in Ukraine with millions of people killed, including the soldiers, millions of people killed, a big percentage of their cities knocked down to the ground, I don’t know how anybody even lives there.”

THE FACTS: No estimates by any reputable analysis place deaths near the millions.
While exact figures of the number of deaths are unknown, Zelenskyy said earlier this month that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the full-scale war in February 2022. He has also said that “tens of thousands of civilians” had been killed in occupied areas of Ukraine, but that no exact figures would be available until the war was over.