Imagine losing five years of contact with one of your parents and not getting contact back to make amends or work things out. A cancer diagnosis sometimes offers a runway, but a heart attack often does not.
The Wrong Dose of Medicine is Poison
Even if you are inclined to take psychological therapy seriously -- especially if you are, I suppose -- you should be mindful of the dangers of excessive intake.
Sorting Out (by) Faith
Via Hot Air, a plea from a defender of Palestinian Christian communities.
[A] number of... Palestinian Christian leaders assured me that they need our love and prayers—but they also badly need practical support if Christianity is not to die in our lifetime in the land that gave birth to our common religion....
The same holds true in Bethlehem (the City of Bread), where not only the French and Polish orphanages but the wider Christian community are literally depending on the Salesian Bakery for their daily bread. Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, jointly administered and run by a coalition of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, stands empty. The Franciscan hostel beside it is shuttered, as are the nearby rows of souvenir shops, while Manger Square is so empty it might as well be in a ghost town.
The all-Christian town of Taybeh, a little over an hour’s drive past Ramallah to the north, is likewise on its last legs. The Khoury family have shuttered their hotel, their beer factory is running at a loss, and, like for the rest of the village, settler roadblocks and vandalism stop them from accessing their crops. Faced with all this, Christians continue to flee via Jordan to claim refugee status in Portugal.
There is probably nothing that can be done to save them, speaking pragmatically. This strikes me as being partly a consequence of the war begun by Hamas with its October 7th blood magic, which designed to use mass human sacrifice as a prayer to Allah for a final reckoning with Israel. They seem to be getting their prayer answered, by whomever it is that answers such prayers; it is likely that this conflict extends beyond human hands, and that its final outcome will not be subject to our opinions but to higher judgments. Everything associated with Hamas, including "Palestine" and anything that chooses that name for itself, is likely to be brought under that judgment. So I guess; but it is not for me to say, or even to know for certain, in matters such as this.
However, I am also reminded that this process has been ongoing for quite some time. Wars intensify and speed it -- the Iraq War, for example, led to the destruction of several Christian and Jewish communities in Iraq as well as the subjugation of other religious minorities. At the Aristotle University in Thessalonica, a recent conference pointed out that the shrinking of Christian communities is part of a trend more than a century long -- or longer yet, if you want to go back before the establishment of Islam, which provoked a great shrinkage through conquest and forced/coerced conversions.
Likewise, Jewish communities across the region have shrunk by approximately 99% in the last century in the Arab countries plus Iran. The 1978 Iranian revolution is part of that story, but mostly it's a reaction by Muslims to a century of relative weakness -- they are attempting to purge the land clean of those who deny the truth of their religion, and they tend to hit the Jewish communities because they are weak and vulnerable to the kind of force that Islamic militants can bring to bear. That's true of Christians and other minority groups as well; it is less true of the Kurds, but even they have been subject to intense violence from ISIS and other Islamic militants as well as from nation states like Iraq (under Saddam), Iran (periodically), Turkey (very much still today), and Syria (under Assad -- the new government at least for now is trying to play nice with the Kurds).
In that sense the current war is just another war, another accelerant thrown onto a long-burning fire. The real question is to what degree that fire will spread to Europe -- or Detroit -- rather than how it will eventually burn itself out in the Middle East.
No Communities In Any Community Rooms
The vote was last night; on consideration, they decided not to allow community meetings in the Cashiers community room either. Only official agents of the state/local government may now use the spaces.
It's odd to me to see the Republicans on the side of restricting the access in this way, because in the 2nd Amendment debate this is the position they reject: 'only agents of the state may be trusted to deploy this liberty responsibly.' The idea that only agents of the state can be trusted to keep and bear arms is in obvious and outright defiance of our tradition of self-governance and human dignity.
Somehow when it's the 1st Amendment, though.... 'you can't allow the community to rent the space from the county because then those weirdos will do something we don't like in a government building, which might give the impression that the community as a whole approves of it' turns out to be the logic, and locking it down to government agents only the accepted response.
Admittedly the Democrats have the inverse contradiction going on, so it's not like they're better -- it may be that they're worse, because 2A liberties are even more fundamental than 1A ones since they get at your ability to enforce your dignity rather than merely express it. However, it remains a striking contradiction.
Ah, Another Prince
Troy Jackson, a powerful Maine legislator now running for Senate, once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn’t persuade a lawmaker to vote his way. He yelled at another lawmaker, prompting her to post on social media that straight men were “too emotional” to be in politics. And he cursed and shouted in a meeting with the speaker of Maine’s state House, until she kicked him out of her office.
During the six years Jackson presided over Maine’s Senate, until he left office in 2024, his temper was a feature of his leadership, and one that Democratic lawmakers discussed among themselves as a problem and even raised with the governor....
His temperament is coming up as he is on the verge of replacing Democratic candidate Graham Platner[.]
Washington Post, so there's probably a paywall -- thus the longer quote.
Probably he doesn't have Nazi tattoos though, so I guess he meets at least one objective standard for being an improvement. Still, don't they have any guys over there who don't act like this?
"Workers Deserve More"
I generally agree that working men ought to receive fair, even generous pay -- that is orthodox, though less common in practice than it ought to be.
Still, I'm a little mystified about how this plan has anything to do with improving outcomes for workers. "Workers deserve more! Step one, abolish the Senate."
What?
All the Gold in California
Don't know how much gold is still in California. But, once, it was the promise of individual liberty.
Ignorance is Part of the Product
We all recall President Obama's speech guy explaining to a noted journalist that, unlike when they got started, journalists now are all 27 year olds who "know nothing." Apparently, at the Washington Post that now qualifies you to write a review of The Odyssey. [Long quotes because it is paywalled, and you shouldn't pay for what follows.]
We can discuss later whether my education was merely eclectic or an utter catastrophe, but somehow, having successfully avoided the spoilers for nearly 3,000 years, I went into an early screening of “The Odyssey” with no idea of what it was about.
I mean, ok, everybody's upbringing is different... but wasn't there someone at the Post who could have taken this assignment who wasn't completely ignorant of the subject?
But hey, sure. Let's have a review by the girl who literally does know nothing. It'll be objective, or something.
But first: what even is “The Odyssey”?“The Odyssey” is a massively long poem.
Look, probably the rest of the audience actually does know a little bit about the Odyssey. You might be able to skip some of the preamble. She did skip part of it; she says she wrote and deleted 'several paragraphs' about disputed concepts of authorship among scholars, which I assume she found out about middle-school style five minutes before her deadline but thought she was qualified to discuss at length.
“The Odyssey” is a thing you can buy tickets to, and we’re going to talk about the movie, I promise; this is the journey part of the story.
You know, this does read like a middle school book report. The research is similarly exacting throughout.
Some of Nolan’s casting choices immediately became controversial. He cast Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong’o, one of the most beautiful women alive, as Helen of Troy, one of the most beautiful women alive... He cast Elliot Page, a transgender man, as one of about a hundred Greek soldiers, and this also ticked off a horde of commentators because, I don’t know, they are weird cashews.
I didn't think much of their complaints either. They probably knew who Odysseus was, though.
“The Odyssey” is a meditation on aging, Amy Poehler suggested to Matt Damon in a recent episode of her podcast, “Good Hang.” “The Odyssey” is a meditation on PTSD, Matt Damon suggested back, while also informing her that “The Odyssey” made him go gluten-free. “The Odyssey” is about “the urgent desire to get home and to belong somewhere,” according to scholar and translator Daniel Mendelsohn; it is about “what it means to survive violence, and what it means to come home,” according to scholar and translator Emily Wilson; it is, said Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, “a journey of the soul.”
So now we are gathering celebrity opinions about the meaning of the poem because they were available on podcasts? Somehow a couple of actual scholars made their way into her field of attention, and thus the book report.
“The Odyssey” is — and let’s be serious movie people for a moment — absolutely astonishing.
Yes, by all means. If this is what 'serious movie people' look like, we can surely all be one if we choose. Maybe I'll be one tomorrow. Why not? "To hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
After sitting in the theater, gobsmacked as the credits rolled, I felt strongly that I had come into the story in exactly the right way: completely ignorant.
Can I tell you whether the screenplay diverted from the original text in matters of importance? I cannot. If it did, it wouldn’t have bothered me. A colleague revealed that her 12-year-old was irritated by the absence of a scene involving the God of Wind which is, apparently, quite important in the original text, and that girl definitely went to a better middle school than I did.
You should have had her write the review. We'd have all been better informed if you had. Child labor laws, I guess.
Justices say 'Whee!'
The Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii secedes from the Supreme Court of the United States, or so I gather from this rant in which they declare they will 'take no guidance' from Federal cases because they think the US is becoming a worse place.
Next up, the Hawaii Supreme Court explains that federal due process rights "keep sinking" so they'll take "no guidance" from federal cases. And here is where the attacks go from odd to deranged. Accusing the Supreme Court of "imperious ideology", it goes to other areas of law...
"The Roberts Court sees only white." The Hawaii Supreme Court follows with more Callais and Allen v. Milligan to accuse the Supreme Court of racism. It accused the Supremes of misinterpreting the Equal Protection Clause.... Now election finance and redistricting. Citizens United, Rucho v Common cause, Presidential immunity, and a recent (minor) election spending case. It's like they put their least favorite cases into Claude....
Now for the page revealing the cause is the tantrum. Wolford v. Lopez and Hawaii's attempt to evade the Second Amendment. It was stymied. These justices are not happy. In a spoke -word-poem style list of grievances, they attack the Supreme Court's recent jurisprudence. Wild!
As with all the rest of this stuff, it's not the first time it's come up. In fact, sometimes it works.
Unlike more notorious attempts by states to reject or nullify federal court decisions, these state laws and decisions remain in effect. How can this be?The reason is simple enough: the Supremacy Clause is not a binary switch. Without complete preemption, our system of federalism leaves room for state law to supplement or stand alongside federal law. States often use that freedom to depart from federal law by passing laws or issuing judicial opinions that explicitly reject specific opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hawaii is going to find it very hard to get away with that on these 2A issues, where the state's insistence would amount to pre-empting Federally defended rights in order to assert powers explicitly ruled unconstitutional. There's probably quite a lot of ground, however, where they can simply refuse to listen to the Federal courts at all.
Vegetarian Animal-Lover...
...one of whose favorite books turns out to be, I learned today, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The recent Sons of Confederate Veterans' presence in the Veterans' Day Parade on the 4th has occasioned another of the endless attempts to convince everyone that there's only one correct way to think about the Confederate Flag.
However, in Germany...
However, as a cultural historian writing on transnational fascism, I see the [apparently not-uncommon in Germany flying of the Confederate] flag as part of a longer history of German nostalgia for the American antebellum South. Germans’ identification with the region stretches back, paradoxically, to the very book that helped bring an end to that era of slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”...This hazy romanticization was undergirded by racial prejudice, which found in Stowe’s depiction of Tom as a “happy slave” a justification for racial hierarchy. Though “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was originally cultivating sympathy for Black slaves, by the early 20th century it was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization. An introduction to a 1911 German edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” describes how “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”
Bettina Hofmann, a professor of American studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, argues that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” introduced racial terms to the German language that foreshadow the Nazi race categories. However, as she qualifies, “it would be an anachronism to accuse Stowe of having paved the way for Hitler’s thoughts on race.”Still, it remains a dim possibility that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had at least some influence. Stowe’s novel was, after all, one of Hitler’s self-proclaimed favorite books.
You can't make this stuff up, really you can't.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Croatia…
Gentlemen, No Communities Here! This is the Community Room!
In the ongoing local saga of the feud over the public library, the county commissioners are proposing to stop the community from using the community room.
The new policy states the room would be limited to library and county government uses only. The move is a part of the larger effort by Jackson County officials to establish new policies for the county’s two public libraries since its official exit from the Fontana Regional Library system that went into effect July 1....The large community room was touted as one of the new JCPL Complex highlights during the capital campaign for the project between 2007 and 2009. Friends of the JCPL volunteer and retired school librarian Antoinette MacWatt said the room restrictions sting particularly hard given how integral the community was in fundraising for it. In total, community members raised over $1.8 million for the JCPL Complex project, while the county provided the remaining $7 million needed to renovate the historic 1914 courthouse.“That’s something that’s been, really, a point of pride for this community that we were able to raise that much money,” MacWatt said. “It feels a little bit like a slap in the face.”
Since the other $7MM was also provided by the community, in the form of taxes, you can see why people might be a little annoyed at being told that they can't use a room that was built for the express purpose of providing a community room.
Note that this does not apply to all libraries in the county, however. Just the one in the problematic blue city of Sylva. In the upscale vacation-and-second-home town of Cashiers, there will be no restrictions. The Smoky Mountain News has the good grace to call this 'puzzling.'
Part of what is so puzzling about the new restrictions proposed at the JCPL is that no such restrictions are proposed in the draft policy for the community room at the Albert Carlton Cashiers Community Library that was also presented to commissioners at last week’s meeting.
In the proposed Carlton Cashiers library policy, there are no restrictions on who can rent out the community room for any permitted uses, including meetings, private celebrations, art shows and “other similar and appropriate uses approved by the county manager,” though library and county government employees would be prioritized over other groups.
No one is really puzzled about this. As I've mentioned, the library has been the #1 issue locally for years and multiple election cycles now. The Republicans who have taken over the county commission view the Sylva library as dangerous to the moral health of the people of the county, likening the regulation they think it needs to the alcohol board's control of the sale of strong spirits. Part of what drove the current commissioners to seek office was a desire to destroy the library as a source of what they see as moral rot.
The Cashiers library, by contrast, is in a very rich part of the county surrounded by golf courses and gardens. They are so comfortable there that this is where the Republican party held its debates during the primaries, even without the threatened ID checks and pepper spray for errant Democrats who might try to attend.
These feuds are getting to the point that they're destroying the goods the institutions were set up to create or preserve. However, so far people seem to prefer to blame the other side and concentrate on winning than to figure out how to restore the goods.
The Odyssey Is Just a Travel Guide to Dining in the Med
So here are some recipes and food parts of the story.
What a trip, though.
On The Odyssey
The forthcoming movie treatment of Homer's epic has generated a lot of commentary, from most of which I dissent. I thought, for example, that Elliot/Ellen Page would have been an excellent choice for Achilles in the Odyssey, as in the Odyssey Achilles is dead. We don't meet Achilles in the Odyssey, we meet the Shade of Achilles. The treatment is largely a meditation on the passing of mortal glory for a hero who was once thought the greatest of men, and has now been unmanned by death. Though Page's situation is different, the actor is better fit than many to fill such a role.
I do agree with this Chronicles suggestion that you should probably encounter Homer's Odyssey itself before seeing the movie. I dissent a bit from the suggestion as to how.
I’d like to urge those interested in the film to read An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, a 2017 memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn. Of course, you can also read Homer’s The Odyssey itself. Yet if you are looking for a brilliant exploration of the ancient poem, An Odyssey can’t be topped.
Over the course of my life I've spent a lot of time with Odysseus, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also as Plato treats him in the Lesser Hippias and the Laws. I agree with the suggestion to pursue the encounter; not to read anything.
Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of oral epic poetry. They are meant to be heard, not read. You will find them shockingly more engaging if you listen to an audiobook version aloud rather than trying to sit down with a huge tome and read it. If you develop a taste for the form, as I did in my youth, I recommend The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord, based upon the research of his mentor, Milman Parry.
There is a lot of discussion about which translation into English is best; much recent commentary dislikes the 'feminist' translation referenced by the director, although I have frankly heard good things about it from academics I know. Dad29 recommended a different one a few years ago, which I reviewed very briefly. I retain my opinion that the Fitzgerald is the best in English. Here is an unabridged audiobook: it is ten hours of your life, well-spent.
If any of you are interested, here are some things I've written at the Hall on the topic:
The debate within the Lesser Hippias, which is also in praise of disagreeable men like myself.
A discussion of Odysseus' invocation by Plato in the Laws.
Also from the commentary on the Laws, a comparison of Conan and Odysseus -- as well as a discussion of piracy!
More Mottes and Baileys
Since I know several of you don't read Instapundit, here is something they linked overnight on variations of the Motte and Bailey fallacy, as identified by the originator of that very useful term.
Harmeet
Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon gets a nice writeup at Hot Air, covering several of her (many!) current activities.
EN I.3 and the ICE Shooting Deaths
In the discussion of the post below on ICE shooting two more people recently, Thomas Doubting expressed concerns that the media treatment of ICE meant that we can't expect the matter to be handled fairly in the press. That turns out to provide a practical example for the application of Nicomachean Ethics (EN) I.3, which I cited frequently during the discussion of the EN.
To some degree the United States is transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society. Mostly it remains high-trust across its breadth and depth; but in certain cities now everything is locked up to prevent theft, and in politics there is deep distrust between factions. There are many costs to such a transition, and one of them is on display here. People on the right do not trust that ICE will be portrayed or treated fairly, and worry that the protests against it and obstruction of it create additional dangers that may sometimes merit (even lethal) force; people on the left do not trust that ICE will behave morally in any case, suspect it is recruited from bad people to begin with, assume any statements from the Trump administration or any of its subordinate agencies are lies, expect evidence to be hidden (or planted!), etc.
As a result, the only way to address any of these shootings in a way that might gain broad public support for a proposed change is to conduct a thorough investigation, assemble and evaluate the evidence, and then publish the findings. Responsible people thus always call for this (Senator Collins did so in this case).
However! Because such an assembly, evaluation, etc., takes so very long, people who just want to avoid accountability and carry on misbehaving also call for such investigations. By the time the process can play out, ten or a hundred or a thousand more things will have happened. The public will have forgotten the details, also the urgency, and nothing will end up getting done. Thus, both the responsible and the irresponsible settle upon the same course of action; and the result is that nothing changes.
The resolution of a problem like this lies in the principles expressed in I.3.
Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits[.]
So too here. When it comes to legal accountability for the shooter, of course the agent is entitled to a full investigation and -- should immunity be suspended -- a fair trial before a jury. In the subject matter of applying criminal law to past actions, that is the appropriate standard.
When it comes to deciding whether we need a safety stand-down to go over lethal force law in detail with ICE agents for a couple of weeks, with practical exercises and considerable reinforcement about the rights and laws protecting the people on the streets, we do not need such an investigation. That subject can be decided on the basis of the probability, inferred from repeated observations of this type, that such lessons would be wisely applied. The subject matter here is a current ethical decision about the best way to proceed given multiple fatal shootings of unarmed civilians by armed agents of the state.
Likewise a reconsideration of how long agents remain in training before they are deployed, armed and immune, on our streets; likewise, a reconsideration of whether immunity is a wise policy in these cases at all.
The application of criminal law to a particular case is not the same subject as an ethical consideration about whether or not to call for a stand down for further training. A different level of certainty is appropriate to the decision.
UPDATE: To their credit, DHS officials seem to have reached this conclusion independently.
Community Standards Differ
Via X. You probably know both songs, and some of you probably even know all the words to both songs. They are of course "Rocky Top" and "Copperhead Road." (Yes, it's an official state song, Tennessee's 11th. Home of Nashville and all that.)
Against Terror, not Arms
Here is a useful post going back to 1328. I want to pull just that one thread of it for today:
Now here's what Bruen said about that.
Go back to 1328. The Statute of Northampton made it illegal to go armed in public “to terrify the King's subjects.”1 This wasn’t a gun-control law in the modern sense. It's actually the origin of a distinction courts are still arguing about today: the difference between carrying lawfully and carrying to menace. (We'll come back to this. It shows up by name in the Bruen decision, 700 years later.)
Here's the statute:
Item, it is enacted, that no man great nor small, of what condition soever he be, except the King's servants in his presence, and his ministers in executing of the King's precepts, or of their office, and such as be in their company assisting them, and also [upon a cry made for arms to keep the peace, and the same in such places where such acts happen,] be so hardy to come before the King's justices, or other of the King's ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the justices or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their armour to the King, and their bodies to prison at the King's pleasure.
As the Wikipedia article points out, this was originally written in Anglo-French, the language of the court. It was really written as 'ne de chivaucher ne de daler arme.'
Now here's what Bruen said about that.
To begin, respondents and their amici point to several medieval English regulations from as early as 1285 that they say indicate a longstanding tradition of restricting the public carry of firearms. See 13 Edw. 1, 102. The most prominent is the 1328 Statute of Northampton (or Statute), passed shortly after Edward II was deposed by force of arms and his son, Edward III, took the throne of a kingdom where “tendency to turmoil and rebellion was everywhere apparent throughout the realm.”... At the time, “[b]ands of malefactors, knights as well as those of lesser degree, harried the country, committing assaults and murders,” prompted by a more general “spirit of insubordination” that led to a “decay in English national life.”...The Statute of Northampton was, in part, “a product of . . . the acute disorder that still plagued England.”... It provided that, with some exceptions, Englishmen could not “come before the King’s Justices, or other of the King’s Ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in Fairs, Markets, nor in the presence of the Justices or other Ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their Armour to the King, and their Bodies to Prison at the King’s pleasure.”...Respondents argue that the prohibition on “rid[ing]” or “go[ing] . . . armed” was a sweeping restriction on public carry of self-defense weapons that would ultimately be adopted in Colonial America and justify onerous public-carry regulations. Notwithstanding the ink the parties spill over this provision, the Statute of Northampton—at least as it was understood during the Middle Ages—has little bearing on the Second Amendment adopted in 1791.....The Statute’s prohibition on going or riding “armed” obviously did not contemplate handguns, given they did not appear in Europe until about the mid-1500s.... Rather, it appears to have been centrally concerned with the wearing of armor....
The Statute’s apparent focus on armor and, perhaps, weapons like launcegays makes sense given that armor and lances were generally worn or carried only when one intended to engage in lawful combat or—as most early violations of the Statute show—to breach the peace.... Contrast these arms with daggers. In the medieval period, “[a]lmost everyone carried a knife or a dagger in his belt.”... While these knives were used by knights in warfare, “[c]ivilians wore them for self-protection,” among other things. Ibid. Respondents point to no evidence suggesting the Statute applied to the smaller medieval weapons that strike us as most analogous to modern handguns.
I mention all this because North Carolina to this day has a law that exactly mirrors the 1328 statute's language. I saw a guy was charged with it locally just the other day. The caselaw here shows that the state courts consider the issue to the be terror, not the arms, and so much so that they've convicted people for 'going armed to the terror of the public' in the absence of arms. Arms in North Carolina are commonly lawfully carried, and require no permit except in the case of concealed arms (which are normally forbidden entirely, excepting only handguns for those with a permit).
You see people carrying arms here all the time; I do myself, like the Medievals a knife in my case. That's not illegal. It's explicitly legal. What's not legal is to go armed for the purpose of terrifying the community. That part has exactly the sort of long heritage in law that the Bruen decision sets up as a legitimating condition for proposed legislation.
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