Algorithms and Heuristics

Judging solely by the heuristic that she has dyed her hair light blue into middle age, I assume that Dr. Cathy O'Neil and I don't share many opinions in common. However, her new work on the harm caused by social media algorithms strikes me as correct and well-considered.

What, by your own understanding, constitutes shame? Is it universal?

It’s universal. But shaming always happens with respect to a norm. And those norms aren’t necessarily universal. Shame is a social thing that happens in the context of feeling like you’re unworthy and you’ll be unlovable by your community....

Do algorithms target shame, or just anything that is popular?

I think algorithms are optimised to service that which will arouse us the most. That usually means outraging us so we perform shame. In our filter bubble, our in-group, the algorithm serves to us the most outrageous thing that some other filter bubble has managed to arrive at, so we have the opportunity to be righteous and lob shame on to that other group, and to create this shame spiral.

That's a nice insight. Social media algorithms do two things, then: first, they identify by our likes and engagement how to aggregate us into online communities of norms; then, they pit those communities against each other by identifying the most egregious violations of one community's norms by another community (which is not, by its own norms, doing anything wrong). 

The result is an online society that is tearing itself apart, screaming at each other all the time. If you actually go out into physical America, it's a nice place full of nice people. If they disagree with each other, they manage to live side-by-side by simply living and letting-live. Online, though, we are driven by the social media companies into intense, daily conflict that is profitable for them because it maximizes page views and advertising revenue -- and, by driving hotter and more frequent engagement, also helps them develop deeper pictures of our individual and communal likes and dislikes. 

It is, in other words, a grave threat to the stability of this and any nation with a substantial online aspect.

A useful comparison and contrast is provided by the current conflict over Libs of TikTok, which is a meta social media aggregator: it lives on Twitter, but curates videos from TikTok. As Mark Hemingway points out, those doxing the curator in order to attack her don't actually grapple with the content she has been curating. They just assume it is bigoted by nature, and go after her for it. 

The comparison lies in the fact that both she and Twitter are attempting to drive conflict within society by pointing out ways in which other parts of society violate the norms of her part. The contrast is that this is being done by a human being who is actually watching and considering the videos, and pushing out those that point to potentially serious issues that need addressing -- especially in terms of how children are being exposed to intense sexualities in public school, and at young ages. Living and letting-live is a good thing, but the public school aspect especially means that this is an area of common concern where commonly-acceptable standards are needed. Confer also Tex's linked powerful and disturbing essay from yesterday on the importance of protecting especially female children but also children and women in general from sexual violence: it isn't just bigotry, but a defense against predation.

Some of this stuff is necessary in a society that has very different norms embedded in its different parts, but which has to learn to live together. Yet the algorithmic violence, artificial and encouraged so that these corporations can profit off the strife they build up, is causing unnecessary and intense harm to us all. 

Beauty Brings us Closer to God

...and this is particularly beautiful and of the season- I wish it were longer, but their primary job is education.  Perhaps if we're lucky, they'll find a way to make some proper recordings.

The beautiful chant of the Easter Sequence, Victimae Paschali Laudes. pic.twitter.com/Y3EzGkJQXA

— Sisters of Aquinas @ QAS Online Academy (@QasOnline) April 17, 2022

All Things Censored

When we lived in China more than twenty years ago, I used to punish bad students by making them stand up and sing their national anthem. Being singled out and made a display was the punishment; I picked the anthem because I figured they couldn’t get in trouble for singing it. 

Apparently that has changed. 

Particularly bold students would try to defy me by singing some live song or something instead. They thought I couldn’t tell, which would have been true except for the reaction of the other students. I couldn’t have cared less, though. 

Speaking the truth

There's a new genre of "how I transformed from a leftist to a conservative" stories, all fascinating, but this is one of the most harrowing and thoughtful I've read.

Because of my experiences, and the newly fashionable denial of reality being promoted by progressives, I find myself sitting with the politically homeless. For now, we are all retreating to old-fashioned liberalism with unlikely new friends—an exodus to a land none of us can see. This divergent group of progressive dissenters won’t find a land flowing with milk and honey, but we might find a place to speak the truth, to cling to those who belong to us, and protect the vulnerable. I’m not sure there is any higher purpose to politics anyway.

Easter

Some reflections on the divine consciousness on Easter, inspired by a pair of posts by AVI.

What was it like for God to look down upon his son on the cross? The short answer that we get from theology is that it is impossible to know because of the limitations of the human mind: we can say some things about it, but we can't experience it. The knowledge of God (here is Aquinas) is perfect, and it extends to all things that follow from his activity -- including the activity of creation. However (see article 7), God does not know things discursively, i.e., as we do via one thought following from another. God apprehends the whole at once, including all of time. (There is a whole lot more to say here, if anyone is interested and wants to ask questions about it.) 

So teaches the theology of the Catholic Church, but also of the Aristotelian branches of Judaism and Islam. Specific to Easter, then, what was it like for God to look upon the cross? Not anything like what it would be for any of us. The point of the Incarnation may have been, then, to allow an aspect of God to experience this mode of mind that -- theologians think -- is not normally available to him. 

But it was not God the Father, but Jesus, who went to Hell. Still too, there, Jesus did not go to Hell as any of us might if condemned to it: Jesus went as master and harrier, and with all the keys. 

These experiences are therefore not like our experiences. They are God's own adventures, unique to himself, which we can observe but in which we cannot readily partake. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but this thing at least has not been given. Our imaginations are inadequate to grasping the mystery. 

Happy Easter -- or Passover, if any of you are Jewish; or Ramadan, as it happens to be, if any of you are Muslim. I'm not aware of any, but I bid welcome to all people of honor and good will. 

Dumas the Cook

When I was a youth I loved The Three Musketeers. I eventually read all million-plus words of the full series, though none of it was as satisfying as the original. I didn’t read a work as ambitiously long until I tackled the Prose Lancelot years later. 

It turns out that Dumas also wrote an ambitious cookbook. Like Chesterton he was a man who greatly appreciated the table, so it’s probably pretty good stuff. 

Good Evening

Gandalf responded to “Good morning!” rather explosively in The Hobbit. I mean that it is a pleasant evening, and I hope that yours is good also. I’m not suggesting that it is an evening to be especially good upon; but it is Good Friday, so I suppose it’s good in that way too. 

I’m frying chicken. There seems to be a full moon rising. I had time for a motorcycle ride late this afternoon, and for a moment all seems well. 

Will no one rid us of this pestilent free-speecher?

Can Elon Musk be stopped? They'll pull out all the stops to try. He's an existential threat, according to their own sniveling, hysterical complaints. Tyrants throughout history have seen this clearly.

If you are offering policies that really benefit nobody but yourself, you have to lie about them, and you must prevent anyone from complaining about it.

Do they care what they say any more?

When Texas Gov. Abbott first started threatening to ship illegal immigrants to blue strongholds, my concerns were only two: I don't want my own allies to join in the ongoing use individual immigrants as pawns in political theater, and I don't want to hear empty threats. The White House inadvertently made an almost valid point by observing that Texas has no authority to lock anyone up on a bus for transport.

This week Abbott resolved both concerns by following through, and by bussing only consenting immigrants to D.C. The White House rather adroitly, if not very credibly, took the line that they were pleased as punch. “So it’s nice the state of Texas is helping them get to their final destination as they await the outcomes of their immigration proceedings,” press secretary Jen Psaki said. The White House got several local communities to make public statements about how thrilled they were to welcome their new neighbors. These protestations may conceivably have been genuine; I wouldn't mind welcoming some immigrant families in my own neighborhood, as long as we were too overwhelmed by numbers and everyone understood that the goal was to assimilate, get employed, and stay off welfare. It was perhaps a little embarrassing to the D.C. spokesmen that the bus was full of single men, not families, but hey. They can meet nice girls here.

Today, however, the Department of Homeland Security showed that it hadn't been read in on the routine. Chris Magnus, head of Customs and Border Protection, complained that Texas can't just be bussing illegal immigrants to distant communities and dropping them off without asking first--that's the feds' job. Abbott was "hurting the government’s efforts to coordinate how the migrants are released." Abbott was "taking actions to move migrants without adequately coordinating with the federal government and local border communities"--again, exclusively the feds' prerogative. He objected that Texas was "interfering with those immigration proceedings by moving the migrants around to places the government may not be able to track"--like the nation's capital? I suppose Mr. Magnus will get some help revising and extending his remarks today.

A Beautiful Morning

More wrench-turning this morning. I actually like vehicle maintenance as long as nothing goes wrong. This morning I set up my grandfather’s old air wrench, which is a joy to use. If I had a better compressor, I imagine that there’s little it couldn’t handle. As it is, even the little compressor is adequate to most jobs. 

Little stuff today: an oil change and rear brakes. Hopefully it will be a pleasant job on a beautiful morning. 

UPDATE: And it’s done, a little before noon. 

A Blackfoot Looks at Conan

His experience was very similar.

Imagine you’re a Blackfeet kid growing up in the windswept pastures twenty miles east of Midland, with no other Blackfeet around. Like Conan the Wanderer, -the Adventurer, -the Outcast, I was out in the trackless wastelands, far from civilization. The way I saw it, we’d come up the same. Conan’s homeland of Cimmeria was high and lonely? From our back porch in West Texas, I couldn’t see a single light. Cimmeria was packed with formative dangers? Every third step I took, I found myself entangled in barbed wire or jumping back from a rattlesnake. And when I mapped Cimmeria—the land Conan spent decades away from—onto my world, it could have been Montana, where the Blackfeet are.

For some values of "free"

A Princeton professor says he “envision[s] a free speech and academic discourse that is flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.”

Princeton presumably has some bright people on its faculty, so they should be able to work out that speech and academic discourse aren't particularly free if they're "flexed to one specific aim." He's free to flex his own speech toward that aim, of course. The problem arises when he "flexes" everyone else's to the same rigid direction.

I wouldn't censor this dolt, of course. I confine myself to ridiculing him. I'd even debate him if he'd up his intellectual game, starting with figuring out what words mean. "Flexing to an aim" is a seriously weird form of discourse.

Always Nice to See Old Friends

Aquinas on Anger, Fin

This is the last article on anger, and I'm going to go through it a little differently because I want to talk about the Greek a bit. It is a technical question on the psychology, to whit, are the species of anger correctly assigned?

Here are the objections.

Objection 1. It would seem that Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 16) unsuitably assigns three species of anger—"wrath," "ill-will" and "rancor." For no genus derives its specific differences from accidents. But these three are diversified in respect of an accident: because "the beginning of the movement of anger is called wrath cholos, if anger continue it is called ill-will menis; while rancor kotos is anger waiting for an opportunity of vengeance." Therefore these are not different species of anger.

Note that this middle species, menis, is the term Homer used for the wrath of Achilles. I suppose the Trojans should be glad they didn't see his kotos. 

To say that no species derives its specific differences from accidents is to say that all species differences are substantial. Aristotle divided the world into substances and attributes. A substance, classically, is the kind of thing that can reproduce itself -- man, horse, dog, but somehow also by extension stone, Accidents are qualities these substantial things have that they might not have had: a big stone, a grey stone, a buried stone. So what this objection is saying is that it's only accidental that an anger has 'just begun,' or 'has continued a while.' We'll see how Aquinas responds.

Objection 2. Further, Cicero says (De Quaest. Tusc. iv, 9) that "excandescentia [irascibility] is what the Greeks call thymosis, and is a kind of anger that arises and subsides intermittently"; while according to Damascene thymosis, is the same as the Greek kotos [rancor]. Therefore kotos does not bide its time for taking vengeance, but in course of time spends itself.

The Greek thymos is often translated as "spiritedness." Plato gives it as one of the three parts of the soul, below reason but above the base inclinations. He assigns it as the chief attribute of the warrior "Guardian" class in his ideal city, ruling over base people but being ruled and directed by those few who are guided chiefly by reason.

The -is is similar to the -icitis that you get in a medical diagnosis. Your appendix is a good thing, or at least not a bad one; appendicitis is a diseased condition of the organ. It is proper to be spirited; but anger is a diseased form.

Objection 3. Further, Gregory (Moral. xxi, 4) gives three degrees of anger, namely, "anger without utterance, anger with utterance, and anger with perfection of speech," corresponding to the three degrees mentioned by Our Lord (Matthew 5:22): "Whosoever is angry with his brother" [thus implying "anger without utterance"], and then, "whosoever shall say to his brother, 'Raca'" [implying "anger with utterance yet without full expression"], and lastly, "whosoever shall say 'Thou fool'" [where we have "perfection of speech"]. Therefore Damascene's division is imperfect, since it takes no account of utterance.

OK. Those are the objections. What does Aquinas say about them? He says that the division is correctly given, citing Aristotle as an authority to reinforce some Christian authorities. He replies to each of the objections in technical ways.

These questions of psychology aren't very interesting: 'how is joy divided into technical parts?' I can't get very excited about it, but read it if you'd like and ask questions if you'd enjoy. The Greek, though, is pretty fun.

More wildlife

My same lurking neighbor caught an excellent portrait of one of the three alligators who live in our pond. This one's getting big. He stays politely in his area and has never menaced our cats or dogs, thank goodness.

Waylon Covers Jimmy Buffet

 

Ecclesia

On Palm Sunday, an etymological reflection of just how important the Ancient Greek world was to the Church. Both of the leading terms still used today derive from Greek, not Latin or Germanic forms — nor Aramaic. So too “Basilica,” not as common but used widely for very important churches. 

I would have told you that ‘kirk” was Germanic, being a Scots word related to “church” but derived from interaction with the Scandinavians (cf. Iceland). And it is, but based on an even older word derived from the Greek. 

Aquinas on Anger, VIII

I really wanted to get to Article VII because Aristotle here is quoted saying something that I think is badly argued. The question of the article is whether we can, or can't, have anger without having a relationship of justice with the object of our anger. 

I answer that, As stated above (Article 6), anger desires evil as being a means of just vengeance. 

This is a real problem, but we'll roll with it for now. A relationship of justice between you and whatever you're angry at (or vice versa) would seem to need to exist, because if there were no justice relationship you would presumably not be angry at having justice violated. That part is straightforward.

But what is a 'justice relationship'? Aristotle and I disagree about where justice arises in human relationships. For Aristotle it appears to arise at the level of politics, not at the level of family or individual relationships as between father and son. Indeed, Aquinas quotes him saying that in this article: "Further, "there is no justice towards oneself . . . nor is there justice towards one's own" (Ethic. v, 6)."

So here's what Aristotle says at Aquinas' 'link' to the EN: 

For justice exists only between men whose mutual relations are governed by law; and law exists for men between whom there is injustice; for legal justice is the discrimination of the just and the unjust. And between men between whom there is injustice there is also unjust action (though there is not injustice between all between whom there is unjust action), and this is assigning too much to oneself of things good in themselves and too little of things evil in themselves. This is why we do not allow a man to rule, but rational principle, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant. The magistrate on the other hand is the guardian of justice, and, if of justice, then of equality also. And since he is assumed to have no more than his share, if he is just (for he does not assign to himself more of what is good in itself, unless such a share is proportional to his merits-so that it is for others that he labours, and it is for this reason that men, as we stated previously, say that justice is 'another's good'), therefore a reward must be given him, and this is honour and privilege; but those for whom such things are not enough become tyrants.

The justice of a master and that of a father are not the same as the justice of citizens, though they are like it; for there can be no injustice in the unqualified sense towards thing that are one's own, but a man's chattel, and his child until it reaches a certain age and sets up for itself, are as it were part of himself, and no one chooses to hurt himself (for which reason there can be no injustice towards oneself). Therefore the justice or injustice of citizens is not manifested in these relations; for it was as we saw according to law, and between people naturally subject to law, and these as we saw' are people who have an equal share in ruling and being ruled. Hence justice can more truly be manifested towards a wife than towards children and chattels, for the former is household justice; but even this is different from political justice.

We should note immediately that most Americans -- at least -- would object to the formulation that a master cannot be unjust to his slave because the slave belongs to him. Most of us would argue that the master is already being unjust to the slave by pretending to own him. The Bible speaks of slavery a great deal, and does not categorically reject it as we; but in Aquinas' day the Church had moved to ban the practice between Christians as fundamentally unjust given the special equality Christians had as brother sons of God. 

Since you were supposed to try to save souls, if you encountered non-Christians you were supposed to convert them rather than enslave them. 

Also, I note that it is only at the level of politics coming to be that this kind of injustice is possible. There might be a natural capacity to enslave another, but there can't be a natural right to do it because the other has the same nature as you: a rational human being. If you have natural rights to freedom, he must as well. It is only the rise of positive law that creates this kind of injustice, and enshrines a 'right' to do this as a master and owner rather than just another free man. 

Therefore, I submit that Aristotle is wrong about where the justice relationship properly arises: that it arises not at the political level, but at the level of personal relationships. These are also, sadly, often the place where we most regularly and intensely experience anger. We may be unjust to each other there, too; but at least we do not have armies and towers and systems of justice standing over us and telling us that we must submit to a law that renders us a slave.

But set that aside: would we accept that a father cannot be unjust to his children? We would not accept that. There are many duties we think a father owes to his children, and failure to provide those things is an act of injustice. If you starve your children rather than feeding them, that is unjust. If you drink up the family wealth, you have acted unjustly and deprived your young sons of the standing they had a reason to hope to have when they became adults and masters of themselves.

For the purpose of the consequences of this bad argument, it is certainly not true that you cannot be angry with your children -- which would follow if we accepted Aristotle's argument. Since you cannot have a justice relationship with them -- and cannot be unjust to 'your own' -- it would therefore be impossible to be angry with them. This is manifestly untrue. I daresay no parent has ever raised a child without being angry at them, and vice versa. 

It is also not true, as Aristotle says and Aquinas endorses, that you cannot be angry with the dead.

"...according to the Philosopher (Rhet. ii, 3), 'it is impossible to be angry with insensible things, or with the dead': both because they feel no pain, which is, above all, what the angry man seeks in those with whom he is angry: and because there is no question of vengeance on them, since they can do us no harm."

This is another area disproven by human experience. Many times we are angry with the dead; although, unlike Aristotle, we are not obligated to imagine them as being free from all possibility of vengeance or pain. Yet even if we do so imagine them, often we are angry at them because of their tragic choices, and the harm and injustice they have done. This can certainly last well beyond the fact of their death.

In any case, this article strikes me as going wrong in a number of places. It relies on one of Aristotle's mistakes -- he was human, however great his mind, and made a few. That leads to bad consequences for our understanding.

Aquinas on Anger, VII

Article VI says that "anger desires evil." That is a very strange thing for Aristotle to say, because he defined the good in terms of desire: the good is what all things desire. (Aquinas followed him, and Avicenna, in the first part of the Summa which concerns the nature of God and thus goodness itself.) 

I answer that, Since goodness is that which all things desire, and since this has the aspect of an end, it is clear that goodness implies the aspect of an end.... Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing).

So this is a real problem, because now evil is the object of desire -- and therefore a good to be pursued. But that can't be, Aquinas has already told us.  

No being can be spoken of as evil, formally as being, but only so far as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil, because he lacks some virtue; and an eye is said to be evil, because it lacks the power to see well.

This is Augustine's point, which we were just discussing recently, and a place where Aquinas and Aristotle differ. Evil properly speaking can't exist for Aquinas; it is only a privation or a lack of something desirable, something beautiful, i.e. something good. To say that anger desires the lack of something desirable does not make sense. 

It especially does not make sense given that anger is associated here with justice, and has been said to be partially governed by reason and mercy. Justice is a good, not an evil. Injustice is an evil, because it is the lack of something desirable, i.e. justice. 

Human will, unlike God's, can be disordered and therefore sinful. If what anger desires is evil, though, it is very basically and radically disordered -- which is the opposite of what Aquinas has been arguing heretofore. 

Aquinas on Anger, VI

 Article V looks very dense, but its easy to sketch. The question is whether desire or anger is more natural to man. Aquinas references Aristotle's Physics II to say that things are 'natural' to us if they are things that arise from our own nature. This is Aristotle's answer to why things move in different ways: because they have different natures. If you drop a stone, which has the nature of earth, it will move toward the earth. If you pour out a bucket of water, which has the nature of water, it will move to a middle position -- the stone would fall through the lake, but the water will join it. Air naturally sits above them, and fire rises upwards. 

And if you turn loose of a bird, it will move through the air wherever it wants -- because it is free to follow its animal nature, and thus to move where it wants to move; but it will fly instead of crawling because of its specific nature, which is that of a bird rather than simply an animal generally. 

Desire is more natural in the general nature of man and all animals; all things want what they desire, and they desire the goods that allow them to continue their existence and that of their species. But specific creatures have specific natures too. Man's is that of a rational animal. Thus, anger -- which responds 'somewhat' to reason -- is more natural to him than desire. 

However, by the same argument reason is more proper to him yet; anger must be governed by reason to be fully in accord with his nature.

“Rich kids can always get Algebra or Calculus”

On Substack, Bari Weiss sums up the week's craziness, including California's decision to trap all 8th graders in pre-algebra in the interest of the usual murky goals. She quotes Freddie DeBoer's observation that families with extra cash will just hire tutors, so this equity-inclusion push will consign only the smart poor kids to the needlessly crummy education track. The truth is, though, that these days any kids can get decent algebra or calculus instruction with or without a tutor. Even the poor kids have some kind of access to the internet, where the educational resources are nearly endless. Any kid that was likely to be able to pick up calculus from high school lectures will be able to get it from internet lectures, if not from a book. You don't even have to be Isaac Newton, who, when he found he lacked this essential tool, simply created it during one of the Western World's more famous lockdowns.

On the other hand, the way things are going, will there still be colleges where you can go anywhere with higher math? I'd love to see aspiring young workers skip the whole thing, learn the math on their own, and get jobs in STEM industry, minus the political indoctrination.

The lockdown link by the way, is a windy attempt to explain why no one should feel bad about not doing world-changing work during lockdown because privilege or something. The problem certainly isn't just that we lack a one-in-a-billion talent! Probably any of us could have pulled it off if we had a Universal Basic Income and some domestic servants.

Wildlife

This fox made an appearance on my lurking neighbor's driveway:

Aquinas on Anger, V

I have time for a second round of this today, and I find I'm warming to the subject. So, Article 4: Does Anger require an act of reason? Passions usually don't, because --as mentioned -- they were thought to be things that you experience passively. They come upon you, and you experience them. 

Anger seems to be a passion, and thus it shouldn't require an act of reason. If that were true, it means several important things in the Aristotelian system. Most crucially, it means it is a lower thing that is more animal than human (this is raised directly in the article). Reason is the human quality; we share many sensations and passions with animals, but they were not thought to share our access to the order of reason. (This was held to be true through the Modern era, which in philosophy means the 18th century. There are strong reasons to doubt it now; but see the reply to objection 2, where even Aquinas creates some doubt.) 

Aquinas quotes Aristotle's discussion to show that anger is at least amenable to reason.  

...anger is a desire for vengeance. Now vengeance implies a comparison between the punishment to be inflicted and the hurt done; wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that "anger, as if it had drawn the inference that it ought to quarrel with such a person, is therefore immediately exasperated." Now to compare and to draw an inference is an act of reason. Therefore anger, in a fashion, requires an act of reason.

That's a funny argument for Aristotelian psychology. Romantic love, the most canonical of passions, also seems to be amenable to reason in that way. You can (and we all do) reason about people you've fallen in love with, and if it's a really bad idea, you can often decide not to pursue your love. It doesn't make as good a novel, but it happens every day.

The answer to that objection is 'reply to objection one.' Aquinas has a part of the rational soul that was absent in Aristotle. The will -- which is Biblical and Christian rather than ancient Greek -- allows human beings to subject even their passions to reason. In that way it improves and perfects even the strongest passions, by making them subject to rational thought.

This cuts against the idea that anger and vengeance are per se good, however: if God gave you the capacity to moderate these feelings with reason, and if (as Aristotle had argued, and Aquinas agrees) reason is a higher faculty than sensitive emotions, then it is only proper to be angry if and insofar as reason agrees with anger. But reason is not a passion, but an activity; and it is not irrational, but rational by nature. A human being was given the faculty for a good cause, and it isn't wrong to experience anger or even to act upon it. Yet we see here why we are morally obligated to subject any sort of anger or desire for vengeance to our rational nature. 

Or, I suppose, we can go to Confession. As Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red said, "What do you think Confession's for?" That line, from a very immoral man's film about the very immoral business of piracy, always struck me as intensely pragmatically wise.

God Bless the American Jury

It’s the last stronghold of freedom. They just did it again. 

Aquinas on Anger, IV

This has been a deeply profitable, honorable and honest discussion which is almost entirely unlike the kind of useless talk we have so much of. Good for you. 

Article 3 gets us even into deeper Yoda territory: anger leads to hate, we are warned specifically in the second objection. It is a kind of desire, a longing of the sort that often leads to damnation. It mixes with sorrow, which is not itself bad -- it can sometimes be a very worthy emotion -- but how brightly that contrasts with the discussion of anger's beauty. 

Aquinas takes a bold strategy here: he simply makes a division. "On the contrary, The concupiscible is distinct from the irascible faculty. If, therefore, anger were in the concupiscible power, the irascible would not take its name from it."

That is to say, anger is too pure to be a kind of desire because anger is its own thing. And that's probably right. It ought to be, I guess, since it's included in the doctrine of the largest faith in human history. It's been true enough that we've accepted that argument for nigh a thousand years.

He actually gives more than a bald assertion. It's rooted in Aristotelian psychology, which you can give as much weight or not as you prefer.

"I answer that, As stated above (I-II:23:1), the passions of the irascible part differ from the passions of the concupiscible faculty, in that the objects of the concupiscible passions are good and evil absolutely considered, whereas the objects of the irascible passions are good and evil in a certain elevation or arduousness. Now it has been stated (Article 2) that anger regards two objects: viz. the vengeance that it seeks; and the person on whom it seeks vengeance; and in respect of both, anger requires a certain arduousness: for the movement of anger does not arise, unless there be some magnitude about both these objects; since "we make no ado about things that are naught or very minute," as the Philosopher observes (Rhet. ii, 2). It is therefore evident that anger is not in the concupiscible, but in the irascible faculty."

That may be hard to follow. Here's a helpful analogy, I hope: I said something very similar in the comments to the post on 1883. Yellowstone is like desire, what Aquinas is calling the 'concupiscible passions.' Yellowstone is about a man who loves his home, and wants to maintain it. Ultimately it means a lot to him, but in the end -- as people keep pointing out to him -- if he loses it won't be that bad. He'd just have to sell the land for a lot of money, and could go do something very similar somewhere else like Oklahoma.

1883 is high art. It's the best thing I've seen in years. 'The irascible passions are good and evil in a certain elevation or arduousness,' that's how Aquinas puts it. It's not just whether you cowboy here or there; it's life and death, good and evil, love and hate, the very highest things we know how to want as human beings. For Aquinas, that's so different from things like mere sexual passion as to be categorically different. It's literally not the same thing at all.

Snowfall

What we often call The Blizzard of ‘93 came in April, so it’s not like I have never see this before. I’ve seen it once. 

1883

I am only a few episodes into this, but I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It’s a work of real, substantial beauty. 

Passacaglia

That’s not a lute, exactly. It’s a theorbo, arguably the most beautiful musical instrument ever made by the hands of man. Almost the most beautiful instrument simpliciter, excepting only the sword. 

Aquinas on Anger, III

I'm going to move on to the second article: whether the object of anger is good or evil. It seems like anger is a bad thing; certainly our popular culture claims that it leads in bad directions. 

Aquinas says that's wrong. The argument he give is striking: "Augustine says (Confess. ii, 6) that "anger craves for revenge." But the desire for revenge is a desire for something good: since revenge belongs to justice. Therefore the object of anger is good."

Is that right? Is revenge good? You have here the authority of two canonized saints that it is.

You know, I'm just going to stop there for today. That's already plenty to discuss.

Voice of reason?

I'm less skeptical than many on the right about Ukraine, so Col. Douglas MacGregor is saying things in this interview that I don't like hearing. Nevertheless he's worth listening to. Obviously he has many views about the Trump and Biden administrations that line up very closely with my own prejudices.

All the Small Things

This is kind of the opposite of the 'old Country sound' post. This was never a beautiful song as a punk rock bit. Put in this context, and it suddenly is.

Somehow it's not even ironic that a guy in clown makeup is singing the thing straight, which the original band couldn't do. The irony of being a clown cancels out the irony of being sincere, owning the emotions honestly and expressing them truly. I have trouble doing that myself, sometimes. There's a huge weight. Maybe I'm getting better at being honest about my feelings; maybe. 

In the end the band stops playing after several renditions of "Carry me home," with the last one being incomplete. The band simply walks away, muted, sad. This is exactly how life leaves us: finally, home no longer exists. The home of my youth, which I dream about almost every night, has been washed away by time. There's no home to go to. 

So perhaps felt Chesterton, who sought another home in Mary.

          And I thought, "I will go with you,

          As man with God has gone,

          And wander with a wandering star,

          The wandering heart of things that are,

          The fiery cross of love and war

          That like yourself, goes on."

          O go you onward; where you are

          Shall honour and laughter be,

          Past purpled forest and pearled foam,

          God's winged pavilion free to roam,

          Your face, that is a wandering home,

          A flying home for me.

          Ride through the silent earthquake lands,

          Wide as a waste is wide,

          Across these days like deserts, when

          Pride and a little scratching pen

          Have dried and split the hearts of men,

          Heart of the heroes, ride.

          Up through an empty house of stars,

          Being what heart you are,

          Up the inhuman steeps of space

          As on a staircase go in grace,

          Carrying the firelight on your face

          Beyond the loneliest star.

I make no apology for linking a punk rock song to punishing questions of metaphysics. It only proves that punk rock is a real form of art; it can be, at least, even if it needs the double-blind form of a painted clown singing it to make it clear.

Yankees Can’t Make Biscuits

The Atlantic explains. 

National Tartan Day

This is the Firefighter tartan, which I guess Tex and I can both wear. My father, were he living; my son, after me, who has also earned the right.

Aquinas on Anger, II

More needs to be said about the role of 'contraries.' This is a fundamental concept for Aristotelian philosophy. The basic explanation is in Physics I. For Aristotle, contraries explain the possibility of any kind of change or motion at all. This comes out of an inquiry into what is necessary for change or motion to be possible. By Aristotle's time this inquiry had been going on for a while, and he gives an account of what his predecessors had thought about the subject.

(Some of them thought that motion and change just weren't possible. Aristotle has an account of why Zeno et al were wrong, in his opinion.)

The basic idea is that change from one thing into another thing requires that there be two states that are opposed -- contrary -- to each other. A favored example is white and black. A thing can start out as white and eventually become black. But white can't become black: they're contraries. Thus, the universe must contain at least things that are contraries to each other, and also things that are substrates which can move between the contraries. This gives us the basic view of the universe: there are substances (substrates), and accidents (things which they happen to have, but could gain or lose or move between).

The problem that Aquinas is wrestling with in the first article is that anger doesn't seem to have a contrary

I answer that, The passion of anger is peculiar in this, that it cannot have a contrary, either according to approach and withdrawal, or according to the contrariety of good and evil. For anger is caused by a difficult evil already present: and when such an evil is present, the appetite must needs either succumb, so that it does not go beyond the limits of "sadness," which is a concupiscible passion; or else it has a movement of attack on the hurtful evil, which movement is that of "anger." But it cannot have a movement of withdrawal: because the evil is supposed to be already present or past. Thus no passion is contrary to anger according to contrariety of approach and withdrawal.

In like manner neither can there be according to contrariety of good and evil. Because the opposite of present evil is good obtained, which can be no longer have the aspect of arduousness or difficulty. Nor, when once good is obtained, does there remain any other movement, except the appetite's repose in the good obtained; which repose belongs to joy, which is a passion of the concupiscible faculty.

Accordingly no movement of the soul can be contrary to the movement of anger, and nothing else than cessation from its movement is contrary thereto; thus the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 3) that "calm is contrary to anger," by opposition not of contrariety but of negation or privation.

NB that "The Philosopher" in this work is always Aristotle, and "The Commentator" is Averroes (i.e. the Islamic Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd). Avicenna, who is of fundamental importance to Aquinas, gets mentioned by name and only once.

This is a weird position, which you can see in part because of the rejection of it in the last paragraph. It would make perfect sense to talk about a movement from calm to anger, and then back to calm as a difficulty is worked out. The presence of the difficulty -- 'the hurtful evil' -- is supposed to produce anger naturally, and it is only by eliminating (or accepting) the evil that you eliminate the anger. 

This is further complicated by the fact that Aquinas has to work it out not in ancient Greek terms but in terms of St. Augustine's account of evil. According to Augustine, evil is a privation rather than something that really exists in its own right. (This is why God can be the all powerful force of Creation, and all Good, but apparent evils still haunt us here.) Thus, the presence of a 'real and hurtful evil' is a sort of impossibility, though one can speak that way about the absence of a longed-for good. 

That's the way to make sense of anger, anyway, according to this tradition. This is also why experiencing anger is appropriate when motivated by real injustice: you're talking about a natural reaction to the failure to live up to God's intent, which a just soul ought to find ugly and outrageous. 

Confederate Jews

Princeton canceled a celebration of 19th century Jewish art because the central figure — and one other — supported the Confederacy.

Ezekiel is a complicated historical figure who fought for the Confederacy and supported the Lost Cause, the idea that the Civil War was about the southern states defending themselves from northern aggression. A second artist whose work would have bee uh n part of the exhibition, Theodore Moise, also served in the Confederate Army. But of course, history is filled with flawed people who nevertheless made important contributions to literature, art, science, and philosophy.

Indeed there is no one else who made important contributions to literature, art, science, or philosophy. To say that any man is damnable is strictly orthodox, as Chesterton said.

Jews had good reason to embrace the Confederacy. The deep tension between the black and white population meant that all other tensions were lessened. George Washington addressed the Jewish community in Savannah, already firmly established. The Irish were welcomed in the South when they were subjected to significant prejudice in the North. Jews in the Antebellum South fought duels, which may not seem desirable until you realize that gentlemen only dueled with equals. If you’d let a Jew take a shot at you in a duel, you accepted him as just as good as you were, no better and no worse. 

It’s not too surprising to find respect being returned.  

Aquinas on Anger, I

This weekend I was busy with emergency vehicle qualification, so I didn't have time to respond at length to an anonymous comment* citing St. Thomas Aquinas on anger. Now Aquinas' discussion of anger is one of the least helpful, most dense things he ever wrote. It requires a Ph.D. in philosophy to understand what he's even talking about. 

Fortunately for you if you were interested in the question, I happen to have a Ph.D. in philosophy. I'm going to spend a few days working through this to try to make it sensible to a contemporary audience.

First, a general comment on reading the Summa Theologiae. The ST is written in a style that was unique to its age. Every single part of it begins not with a statement of doctrine, but with objections to the doctrine. You get the actual doctrine in the middle, and then replies to the objections. People think the Middle Ages was all about stoning heretics, but in fact it gave a lot of attention to considering their objections and replying to them thoughtfully. Objections to the doctrine of faith were centered, as the philosophy kids say today. 

Here we are in the second part of the first part of the ST, the first part of the first part dealing with God. Here we are dealing with God's principal creation, man. This is a proto-psychological reading of how the insides of a man work. Because it predates psychology by a long time, it may be a better or worse understanding than the ones that psychology itself has developed. I tend to be pretty suspicious of psychology as bad philosophy, but it's fair to argue either side here.

So, article one of question 46 asks "if anger is a special passion." What on earth does that mean?

It might be helpful to compare with fear, which also proves to be a "special passion." The contrast is with a "general passion," i.e., a passion that is overriding of everything else. Aquinas notes that all the passions are connected, though, through love: so you can still get an overriding special passion if it is intense enough.

Well, hold on: let's drop back. What is a passion? It is important to note the cognate between "passion" and "passive." In ancient and medieval philosophy, a passion is something that happens to you. You're not in charge of it, it acts upon  you. (The Irish speak this way: "Joy was on me," "Sadness was on me," "Anger came on me.")

Anger is confusing, because it is caused by contraries. You are angry because you hoped for something better, but are confronted by something worse. The arising of contrary emotions in the soul is disruptive (cf. cognitive dissonance theory in current psychology).

Note that Aquinas is defending the prospect that anger is a "special" and not a "general" passion, but in fact isn't really able to come down solidly on the point. "But, in a third way, anger may be called a general passion, inasmuch as it is caused by a concurrence of several passions."

He was a genius and a miracle, Aquinas, but not every single thing he said is going to prove out. We're going to see some more problems as we work through it.

* Hall rules require comments to be signed; the name can be a pen name, but we need to keep track of which person is talking. Fully anonymous comments are not allowed as a consequence.

War on Grass

The Mongols had it down. 

How to Get That Old Country Sound

Last we heard Buddy Brown here he didn't fare so well. He's an openly conservative country musician with a sense of humor, but he's playing contemporary country and it sounds like all the rest on the radio today.

Now he's put out an album in an early 70s style. This quick video explains all the stuff he did to try to get that sound. I'm not that familiar with everything that goes into making an album, so it was interesting for me. It explains why it's hard to put out songs like Merle's today.

Here's one of the songs from the album:

If you don't mind some bawdy language, here's a fun one:

Here's the whole playlist.

Smoked Chicken Sunday

Not as artful as Tex, but I’ll bet it will be tasty. 

Pizzapalooza

We tried pizza in the outdoor bread oven for the first time last night. We started with a quick (8-hour) dough recipe made for a medium-hot oven, around 500-600 degrees, and baked about 10 smallish pizzas for the 8 of us, with a variety of toppings. The crust came out amazingly well: crisp with a well-developed flavor.

Since we had several dough balls left over in the fridge, I tried again using the indoor oven today for lunch and found that worked pretty well, too, even though I can't get my oven much above 500. At that temperature, with refrigerated but not frozen dough, it baked in 8 minutes. Apparently the refrigerated balls of dough will last perfectly well in the fridge for several days, and in the freezer for several weeks. Unrefrigerated, they're good for several hours after they've reached their recommended fermentation stage. Pizza dough, unlike bread dough, has an extremely brief first rise followed by a longer second rise. You can finish the whole process in 6-8 hours if you can keep the dough at 80-90 degrees. If you rush it a bit, it will still taste good, but will be a bit springy when you try to stretch it out into a suitably large round. That doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. None of our crusts were thick enough to fail in crispness, and no one minded the wavy perimeters.

We'll definitely be doing this again. If we were going to shoot for a larger crowd, we'd have to use a wetter recipe calibrated for a much hotter oven, so we could cycle the pies faster. They say a Neapolitan pizza bakes in 90 seconds at 900 degrees. We can definitely get the wood-fired outdoor oven up that high, though I'm not sure how easy it will be to hold it there. We'll have to see how much harder it is to work with a wetter, softer dough.

My favorite turned out to be the extremely simple Margherita: a little fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. I was surprised to find that the ordinary all-purpose flour version was a little tastier than the fancy Anson Mills pizza flour. So that's lucky, because the local grocery store stocks a good King Arthur AP flour. It can also usually be counted on to carry some fresh basil out of season. For tomatoes, we used a high-quality canned San Marzano brand that we order online by the case year-round, but the grocery store's hydroponic fresh tomatoes have been quite good in the last few years, too. The tomato industry has figured out how to transport a fresh tomato with flavor. The tomato sauce is really just an instant puree; no need to cook it down unless your tomato source is too watery.

We oversupplied ourselves with a wide variety of other toppings, such as onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, olives, sausage, feta, and Alfredo sauce, but another time I may not bother, considering how tasty the Margherita was. The volume of toppings was vastly more than necesssary, as well, but most of the leftover veg went into some excellent omelettes this morning for us and our two houseguests. (Last night we were joined by four neighbors.)

Here's the indoor slice from today, which had a decent crust, though not as crisp as the outdoor pies from last night:

Emergency Vehicle Driving

This weekend is the annual recertification exercise for driving big fire trucks and such. The over the road exercises are fine, as is most of the obstacle course, with the exception of the serpentine event. There you have to weave the vehicle through a series of cones, which is fine; but then you have to back it through the cones in the opposite direction from how you went forward. Everyone eventually passed it, but there were numerous second tries. 

By coincidence the exercise coincided with the 50th birthday of a member. Thus, a surprise party. 

Less happily it also coincided with a benefit barbecue by a neighbor county for a firefighter who was burned in a recent emergency. We sent the birthday boy over to pick up some Boston butts from their benefit, which also gave us time to set up the surprise party. 

There’s a lot of value in these civic organizations. Even apart from the rescue and fire protection, the community is stronger and better because of these common efforts. 

Garden Expansion

 We’ve decided to lay in a third raised bed this year, expecting food to be somewhat expensive or even somewhat short. The older beds are turned over and ready. The new one is framed, but the hard work of breaking the earth is yet to be done. 

Exposure in Maryland

Restoration of a traditional practice is usually, but not always, a good thing. 

Cesspool of Sellouts

Or possibly it’s a ‘cesspool of sin,’ as this out-of-shape Yankee* explains. Either way I was there yesterday. 

The city is actually looking much less like a cesspool of any sort following a campaign to drive out the homeless and clean up the town. One of the small parks near this sign on Patton avenue was being used by families with small children instead of the usual sleeping addicts. I’m not sure what occasions this radical departure from the city’s deeply held values of tolerance and inclusion, but it was surprising. My wife had asked me to link up with her because she needed to walk by that park, and disliked the usual harassment she faces when doing so. This time, cute children instead. 

We also saw a pair of immature bald eagles struggling for dominance on the east fork of the Pigeon river. This was heading back along US 276. There was massive flooding there recently, and though progress has been made there are still clear signs of the disaster. The road is no longer closed between the Parkway and Waynesville, though. And there’s a new Scottish pub in Waynesville, an ideal motorcycle destination provided virtuous moderation is practiced (or else accommodation in Waynesville is found).

* AVI and others from the real North occasionally note that their own usage of "Yankee" has a very different content than the one that Southerners intend. In this case, though, 'Yankee' is the speaker's own choice of appellation -- if you watch his channel's intro video, that's the word he chose to describe himself. 

R.I.P. Good Dog

I took in this beautiful creature, Greta, several weeks ago. She turned out to be 12 years old and heart worm positive, with liver enzymes too high to stand treatment unless we could get them down. She was emaciated and had tapeworms. After we got rid of the heart worms, she led the life of Riley here for two weeks, eating all day every day and fattening up nicely.

But Friday night she sustained a trifling injury in a scuffle with one of my other dogs. I thought nothing of it until the next day when she swelled up everywhere and was prostrated. She spent all weekend at the emergency vet hospital, where I thought she was improving, but it seems that the minor injury triggered what must have been a serious auto-immune disease, because she seemingly lost all ability for her cells or vessels to retain fluid, and her own system was destroying all her red blood cells. Her immune system may have been on crazy high alert from the heart worms.  That probably means it wasn't ever going to be in the cards for me to get her strong enough to treat the heart worms, and when we put her down this morning she escaped what otherwise would have been a long decline with heart disease.

She was such a sweetie. I don't regret taking her in and giving her two good weeks with all the food she could eat and a safe place to sleep. This is her just last Friday, right before she cratered.  We have buried her here with all our other dogs.

Good for Will

This was very satisfying video of Will Smith punching Chris Rock at the Oscars. Straightforward and heartfelt. I'll bet he didn't stop to agonize about whether it was woke or fashionable.

Another Exciting Afternoon

Up here we’re so far from everything that whenever we call for Medivac it’s always to some totally improvised LZ. 

Childhood

Over at An Eccentric Culinary History:

If you want a single dramatic example of how much America has changed in the last century or so, stop talking about trips to the moon and super computers and start talking about this: in 1910, two brothers, Temple and Louis Abernathy, saddled up a pair of ponies and rode alone from their home in Frederick, Oklahoma, to New York City, almost 2000 miles away, to see Teddy Roosevelt give a speech. At the time, Louis, called “Bud”, was 10 years old, Temp was 6.

It's a good story.

Saturday Night Firefight

Part of the Nantahala National Forest burned tonight, but not a very big part. The National Weather Service warned that the high winds would make for a fire hazard, and sure enough they blew down a power line. That caused a fire, which the high winds quickly fanned up and over the ridge and down into the next valley. We managed to contain it between the road and a nearby cold water creek, plus some artificial fire breaks created by guys with leaf blowers. That worked until the Forest Service got up there with a bulldozer to plow in a proper fire break.

Whose Lamentations?

Conan The Barbarian Acquires Biology Degree So He Can Know Whose Lamentations He's Hearing

Bonus: The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine

Believers

 

This Would Be A Good Year to Plant A Garden

Thirteen percent of global calories won't get raised this year due to the war in Ukraine.

The US has an option here: suspend ethanol for the year, and use that corn for food instead. That violates the dearly-held Green policies of the current administration and those in power in Congress, however. 

As Predicted

"Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology" have weighed in on the question of what a woman is and -- exactly as predicted yesterday -- they want to be clear that a biologist couldn't tell you either.

Slandering Americans Overseas

The 'very good people on both sides' slander aimed at Trump is bad enough, but -- as David Reaboi points out -- it is amazingly awful to slander American citizens as Nazis while in Europe supporting a government that actually has an openly neo-Nazi wing, the Azov Regiment.

Ukraine may still be worthy of support because they are being invaded, and we are supposedly devoted to opposing wars of aggression. Or they may be worthy of supporting because it is in our national interest to tie the Russian military down and degrade it, so that it is less of a competitor. 

However, if you support Ukraine it's not because you're opposed to Nazis in some sort of principled way. You're siding with a government that has formally integrated Nazis into its military; and while the government has suspended political parties that have any sort of pro-Russian agenda, the Nazi political party associated with Azov is still licensed to operate.

Army Approves Lower Standard for Women

The ongoing saga of the Army's new fitness test has reached a crescendo. As you will recall, the Army declared it was getting rid of its 'old fashioned' fitness test -- which consisted of a two mile run, pushups, and situps -- in favor of a new-fangled "Combat Fitness Test" that would test a wider range of capacities more directly related to the things you'd really do in combat. Unlike the old test, too, they declared that the test would be both gender neutral and age neutral.

It turned out that 65% of female soldiers failed the new test, which would have had to result in their expulsion from the force. The rest scored notably lower than male soldiers, which would have made them less able to obtain promotions as enlisted promotions are partly based on fitness scores. So, they started talking about redesigning the test -- but not, we were assured, in a way that would hold women to lower standards.

The next step was to admit that women would have to be scored only relative to each other, and not relative to the men in order for them to remain promotable under the new system.

That was not sufficient either. The test will now scrap the events women couldn't pass, and allow both women and older men to pass with lower scores. 

At this point, then, the ACFT has comprehensively failed: it will neither be age nor gender neutral, it will not hold women to equal standards, it has eliminated test of combat-related capacities that are difficult for women, and it has become thoroughly a political exercise designed to produce desirable results rather than to serve as a fitness exam. In addition, it still has the logistical problems that come from swapping from equipment-free events like running or pushups to tests that require equipment to perform. 

Comprehensive failure is becoming the norm, I notice, whenever the brass gets involved.

Beware Fitness & Good Health

Fitness especially may lead to terrible things. Allegedly Nazism, that perennial fear of leftists even though it’s a form of socialism. 

After discussion of how fitness is now feared as yet another gateway to right-wing politics, the author makes a good point: the left is who is building all these gateways. 

The Left has made a habit out of forbidding things that are normal or even admirable to pursue—physical excellence is just one of those things. Raise doubts about transgender pronouns or election integrity and you—moderate, well-adjusted, not-even-all-that-political you—are suddenly a potential Unabomber.

If you wanted to force people into the arms of conspiracy theorists, you could hardly come up with a better strategy than to pathologize normalcy and make observing basic facts into a thought crime.

Who among us can define woman, though? 

A Sword of Eisenhower

Well, it passed through his hands anyway. It originally dates from the tenth century.

The Definition of a Woman

FOX News mischaracterizes Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's response as a "refusal" to give the definition of "a woman." She did not refuse so much as she claimed an incapacity to define it, stating that she was not a biologist. 

What's truly sad about this response is that it won't even satisfy the intended clientele. By implying that only a biologist could define 'a woman,' she is conceding that the answer is related to material biological reality. It is not, then, a matter of felt or claimed or chosen identity. It's something about one's physical body.

This is the kind of absurdity that must eventually collapse, but it may well not collapse quickly enough to avoid putting this person -- woman? -- on the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: The Federalist points out that Judge Jackson has used the word "woman" extensively in her legal rulings. 

Socrates got himself killed by talking to 'experts' who used terms that it turned out they couldn't define. My favorite of these dialogues is the Laches, on courage, but perhaps more to the point is Euthyphro. There the question is whether Euthyphro can define "piety," a serious matter because he is doing something many thought impious at the time -- bringing a suit for murder against his own aged father on the word of a slave. It turns out that his definitions could not hold up to inquiry, leaving him open to the charge that he was acting as if he had confident knowledge on a deadly subject he did not in fact understand. 

Jackson evades the danger of being tested on her definition by refusing to give one, but her regular usage of the term implies that she is subject to the same critique. If you have regularly issued judgments on the subject of women, you are acting like you know what a woman is -- how else could you make any sort of reasoned judgment about them? Yet she claims to be unable to explain it, except that by implication it is a matter of biology. Indeed, she has testified under oath that she cannot define the word that has been the subject of so many of her judgments.

Quoting Jesus to Justify Invasion

Jesus is a much sterner figure than many people imagine, thinking of him as the King of Peace, Love, and Forgiveness -- which is not wrong, but not complete. It is not impossible nor even incongruent to think of Jesus as one who 'brings not peace, but a sword,' or who encourages his followers to 'buy a sword even if you have to sell your coat.' 

Still, it's harder to see him justifying an invasion.

Speaking to the crowd in a turtleneck and down winter coat, Putin said he ordered the invasion "to get people out of their misery, out of this genocide, that is the main reason, the motive and purpose of the military operation that we began in Donbas and Ukraine," according to The Washington Post. Russia has repeatedly accused the Ukrainian government of committing genocide in separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine.

"And this is where the words from the Scriptures come to my mind: 'There is no greater love than if someone gives his soul for his friends,'" Putin continued, paraphrasing John 15:13.

Both the Post and ABC News translate the Russian word душу (dushu) as "soul," but most English translations of the passage use "life." 

If in fact a genocide was occurring, as he claims -- and perhaps believes -- it might work. One of the justifications of the Iraq War was that Saddam was engaged in a sort-of genocide against the "Marsh Arabs," and there are arguments in Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars that state that anyone who could stop a genocide has 'a right, at least, to try.' Walzer himself opposed the war, but the arguments exist whether or not he thought they fit the particular facts. 

So maybe, insofar as Putin truly believes these claims (and especially if he were right to believe them).

Push-Button Tyranny

A well-considered article in Tablet magazine warns of the perils of Trudeau-style cancelation without trial. It is a more dangerous power than may be apparent without such consideration. 

An Odd Correlation

Jordan Schachtel, a journalist who has been voicing a lot of skepticism about Ukraine, notes an odd correlation between vaccine status and support for risk military action in Ukraine.

Or perhaps not so odd: the same correlation shows up in Canada.

It's easy enough to guess why this is the case: those who have been inclined to take booster doses are more likely to be heavily exposed to information sources that have tended to portray this as the wise and responsible course; those same sources happen to be all about Ukraine right now. Those skeptics, by contrast, have been learning to discount those same sources and to trust alternative media -- which is more likely to be skeptical of the government here, as well. 

(Should you be skeptical of our government's support for Ukraine? The government there has barred opposition political parties -- but not formally neo-Nazi parties who are integrated with their armed forces -- and seized control of the media. Of course, it's wartime; on the other hand, those are totalitarian moves that contrast sharply with the narrative we're seeing in these pro-Ukraine US media sites. Make up your own mind how skeptical to be; I'm not here to tell you that.)

Maybe this all says less about Ukraine, and more about how deep the division is in our own society. Or maybe it says that this division is mostly a product of information choices, and otherwise might not be so deep after all. If it were possible to address that effectively, perhaps we would come together.

Or perhaps not; the divide may be more deeply rooted than where you get your news.

If you're interested in the Ukraine conflict, however, here's CDR Salamander on Russian amphibious operations.

Equinox

Happy springtime. The weather here is beginning to feature some nice days, but still freezing at night. There’s an eagle soaring on a thermal in the valley below. 

Another Twenty Minute Job

Lately it seems like every repair project has a broken bolt, or a head that rounds off, or some other weary complication. A job that ought to take a few minutes ends up taking all day, or in today's case will now take at least through tomorrow. Today I was just going to replace the front struts in my Ford, and I figured that if I was going to do that I ought to redo the brakes and maybe swap out that one wheel bearing that's been sounding funny. After all, you have to remove almost all the same stuff to get there. 

Well, maybe tomorrow. Or soon.

Also, my oil dipstick on that truck broke in my hand when I went to check the oil. Flush with the engine block, it did. Now I'll have to tap the thing with a drill, run a screw into it, and pull it out with Vice Grips. But that will have to wait until the new one I ordered comes in.

UPDATE: I finished that list on Tuesday due to issues with the upper ball joint on one side, but now I have a new list of things to fix just as AVI warmed. 

Whee

Trudeau was so upset that some guy showed up at the trucker protest wearing a mask (at a protest aimed at eliminating COVID measures) and carrying a swastika flag. He was so upset that he mentioned it over and over, trying to paint the whole movement as if that one guy -- that one faceless guy in a crowd of people with no masks -- was emblematic of the movement as a whole. He even accused a Jewish MP of 'standing with the swastika' for questioning his repressive measures. 

So what's up this week?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland met with the co-founder of a far-right fascist party in Ukraine, which was styled off of Hilter’s Nazi Party, True North has learned.

Andriy Parubiy served as the equivalent of the legislative speaker of Ukrainian Parliament from 2016 to 2019, and during that time he personally met with Trudeau and Freeland several times.

Earlier in his career, Parubiy was an influential member of Ukraine’s far-right neo-Nazi movement. In 1991, he co-founded the Nazi-styled Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) – a party focused on “racial nationalism” that even adopted the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo. 

Yeah, that's where we are with philosophical coherence and our leadership. There is none; it's just about power with them.

The Feast of St. Patrick

St. Patrick warns of dragons:

The Most High does not accept the gifts of evildoers. The one who offers a sacrifice taken from what belongs to the poor is like one who sacrifices a child in the very sight of the child's father. Riches, says Scripture, which a person gathers unjustly, will be vomited out of that person's stomach. The angel of death will drag such a one away, to be crushed by the anger of dragons. Such a one will the tongue of a serpent slay, and the fire which cannot be extinguished will consume.

I have read that in Ireland his feast day is generally somber, coming as it always does in Lent.