Purity and the Holy Grail

Tom and I were talking about purity and its discontents a while ago in a post on theology. I want to talk about it a little more, in terms of the Quest for the Holy Grail and then in terms of practical societies. The quest for purity seems like a good ethical norm at first, but it reliably leads even very good men to destruction -- and normal men to truly terrible things. 

I'm starting with the Arthurian fiction because that's what I want to think and talk about today, much more than I want to think or talk about the practical societies of today. The Arthurian vision is one that inspired me for much of my life, adding beauty and meaning to existence. The knights of the Round Table were recognizably human, motivated by love and lust, family and kinship bonds that occasionally contested with their bonds of political loyalty or honor, virtues and vices. Yet they were recognizably good men, too, in spite of their flaws. Their society led men to strive for what was good and just, and to sacrifice of themselves to realize that kind of goodness and justice that was capable of being realized in the world. Their adventures nearly always began with an appeal from someone who had been wronged, and involved them striving and sacrificing to bring about a just ending to the adventure. 

So when they were granted a vision of the Holy Grail, most of these knights decided to go on that adventure too. It was a divine vision, one that called them to achieve the very highest things, things that could only be achieved through actual human perfection. As a consequence, the Round Table was destroyed, most of the knights killed or savaged; in Malory the few who proved good enough all died, one of them because he prayed to God to be allowed to die to avoid having to return to the impure world. In other versions Perceval achieves the Grail, but alone and only through tremendous suffering (the name per ce val seems to mean 'through the valley,' i.e. the famous one from the 23rd Psalm). Sometimes he dies afterwards, too.

In later literature partly inspired by all this, Fritz Leiber has a wizard tell his heroes: 

"Never and forever are neither for men/
You'll be returning again and again."

So too perfection and actual purity, which belong in Christian theology only to God. Like "never" and "forever," these perfections exist in the realm of ideas rather than in the real world. The character of Galahad in Malory is a kind of blasphemy because he is an imagination of what Lancelot might have been like if he had been morally perfect. Galahad is Lancelot's son, conceived ironically out of wedlock; but the king's daughter who was Galahad's mother tricked Lancelot by enchantment into thinking she was Guinevere. Now that means that Lancelot didn't conceive his son while intending to commit the sin that he was committing, only a different sin of which he wasn't actually guilty (i.e. adultery with Guinevere); and somehow this is as close as Lancelot can get to a blameless union. His son, who descends on his mother Elaine's side from the lineage, King Pelles', that is associated with the Grail's keeping, is therefore allowed to be perfect. Perceval, more human, does not end up having as good a time in search of the Grail.

Yet all these sinful knights had been having a wonderful time up until this quest for perfection. They went from success to success in their wars, until no more wars needed to be fought. Then they had joyous tournaments and feasts, punctuated by occasional and successful quests for practical justice. The striving appropriate to the human condition -- as opposed to the devotion to true metaphysical perfection that is impossible for men -- brought about Aristotelian flourishing, eudaimonia, happiness.

"Was it something I thought?"

PowerLine asks this question about a City Journal article by Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard University and the CDC, who lost both positions by committing heresy.

What Harvard and the CDC lost was their credibility.

Firefighters and Hussars

There's a commonplace in Russian humor about Hussars, cavalrymen whose lives of adventure and danger -- and livestock -- have given them a straightforward manner of speaking, one that clashes with the sensitivities of the nobility.

This theme culminates in the following joke, sometimes called "the ultimate Hussar joke":

Countess Maria Bolkonskaya celebrates her 50th anniversary, the whole local Hussar regiment is invited, and the Countess boasts about the gifts she has received: "Cornet Obolensky presented me a lovely set of 50 Chinese fragrant candles. I loved them so much that I immediately stuck them into the seven 7-branch candlesticks you see on the table. Such auspicious numbers! Unfortunately there is a single candle left, and I don't know where to stick it..."  

The whole Hussar regiment takes a deep breath... but the Hussar colonel barks out: "Hussars!!! Silence!!!"

Rather a similar situation going on in New York just now. What were those people thinking, putting a vain and sensitive politician in front of a bunch of firefighters?

Imagining LotR as 1950s Hollywood

Here’s a good use of these graphics AIs. What a film this might have been, had the timing been right to make it. 

The Rats are all High

New Orleans police have a rat problem, which has created an evidence problem. 

The Scariest of All

One animal frightens the beasts of Africa even more than lions. 

Small wonder. 

The Numbers Aren't Real

Now this is an interesting argument, with graphs to back it up: the Gaza numbers aren't real.

Even if you take the numbers at face value, they put paid to the idea that this represents a 'genocide' by the Israelis; 30,000 is 0.2% of the Palestinian population, after four months of fairly intense urban warfare. If they really wanted to wipe out the 14MM people, they'd need to be working a lot harder at it than this. 99.8% of them are still alive, even if we accept the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers.

But we shouldn't, as the article lays out. The mathematical anomalies are such that the numbers look invented, not natural.

Brutality in Philosophy: An Appreciation

A columnist named Kathleen Stock has penned a piece on what's wrong with academia, which she summarizes as a failure to replace the kind of professors who would destroy each other's weak arguments. 

In academic publishing too, there was scope to be savagely biting. In battles over theories of mind, one might find Colin McGinn feuding bloodily in the reviews section with Ted Honderich: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”, began one notorious review...

I also come out of the more spirited tradition of creative destruction in philosophy, which remains in force in some schools. It was once thought crucial to get over the distress of having your ideas savaged by professors with keen wits and tongues alike; you would learn to make better arguments by seeing what was weak in what you already thought. I remember one distraught young woman being approached after such a savaging by the professor, who asked, "If you had argued the other side, I'd have come at you just as hard." It's nothing personal; it was the job. 

I recommend her article for its insight; also this one of hers, which addresses a question we used to argue over quite a lot back in the early days. That question was whether or not there was a 'female brain,' appreciably distinct from a 'male brain,' and what it might mean if there were. Those of you who remember the grand feuds we used to have at Cassandra's place will find that the two pieces line up: she and I used to go hammer-and-tongs at each other's ideas, without ever failing to respect and honor each other personally. That was the spirit of the thing, back in the old days when this blog was headed by a quote from Chesterton's "The Last Hero":

How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,

Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.

Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,

When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.

The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, --

You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Perhaps there was wisdom in that.

Tennessee River

We live in the birthplace of headwaters. The creek that runs by my house joins the Tuckasegee river, which flows to the little Tennessee and thus to the Tennessee, Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Just a few miles away is the headwaters of the Chatooga, which flows to the Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. Likewise the headwaters of the Pigeon, which joins the mighty French Broad River; and likewise the French Broad itself, which originates in forks within a few miles of my home. 

To love a land is to know its rivers, their origin, course, and rifts. You’ll know a man who loves his country when you meet one who can tell you how its rivers flow. 

Alternatives to the state

Texas Monthly, a supremely annoying publication, is sad about the "lurch to the right" in this week's Texas primaries. The problem, you see, is that capitalism can't function properly unless counterbalanced by other institutions--especially, in the author's view, the Democratic Party and unions.

This is a distorted shadow of something I've always believed, which is that government can't function properly unless counterbalanced by private institutions, some of the most important being families, churches, private enterprise, and voluntary civic organizations of all stripes. I'll lump unions in there if they're truly voluntary and not just tools to extract dues from unwilling members to be money-laundered for the Democratic Party. As a stretch, I'll include political parties, as long as we're not pretending there's only one.

Whatever one thinks about the voters' recent destruction of Texas RINO careers, it's not about capitalism triumphing over private institutions. Republican primary voters wanted school choice, border security, and an end to the war on Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose initiatives, especially his court-thwarted attempt to investigate election fraud, were quite popular in the Lone Star State. They'd also had it right up to here with current Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who tends to appoint Democrats to head House committees and smothers conservative legislation in its crib when he can. Texas Republican primary voters had an immeasurably low interest in ensuring that either the Democratic Party or unions retained any power to hamstring the Texas legislature, but they're pretty open to measures to strengthen the role of families, churches, and private enterprise as a counterweight to government overreach.

Big Bear

Stack Up Or…

FPC has a proposition. 

We usually avoid that sort of language around here, out of courtesy and a desire to accommodate people of gentle temper. Still and all, the demand is hereby rejected. 

Biloxi by Two

Might as well keep on riding if you manage it. 

The Skies Above

This essay begins with an interesting set of questions and observations:

Is a god, or any divine power, only a mirage of the human-made political structures that oppress us? This understanding of religion, popularized by 19th-century thinkers like Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, has become received wisdom among the anthropologists and sociologists studying the origins and functions of religious life. We sense that we live under forces of authority that constrain us, and yet we cannot precisely locate or understand them. Needing to give some shape or form to this coercion, we project it onto the clouds, fashioning heavenly beings...

Yet the existence of societies without chiefs or kings, or any vertical political organization, challenges this picture. In communities that traditionally recognized no rulers or government, from Tierra del Fuego to the Central Arctic to the Philippines, we still find complex concepts of celestial hierarchies, metahuman authorities, and bureaucracies of deities and spirits with no correspondence to the human social order. Where do these ideas come from, which reflect no living conditions on the ground? 

The stories in the essay are also noteworthy, but the basic question is striking. It seems as if our sense of hierarchy doesn't reflect social or material conditions. It might still be materialist in its origin -- perhaps it represents an inherited sense of reality as played out in the DNA or genes of our evolved bodies. If so, it ought to be a pretty basic sort of inheritance given that it is expressed by all human societies; but if that is the case, why are the expressions also so different and varied? Why do some believe in a heavenly father, but others in mercenary spirits that have to be placated to avoid bad luck? 

In a sense the question is allied to another question, that of whether our attempts to track back the Indo-European language's evolution can similarly let us reconstruct an earlier proto-religion among the peoples who spoke those languages. I think it's well known that Thor looks a lot like pagan deities both Celtic and Slavic, just as one can find common ur-roots for Celtic and Germanic and Slavic words. Our words continue to evolve all the time, so perhaps it is no surprise to find Tacitus saying that he thinks of Woden as being the Germanic sort of Mercury, whereas to another Woden looks more like Bacchus. Just as words slip and change in meaning, perhaps so too the ideas speakers have about the divine. 

Even today, how we talk about these things follows the pattern described here:

If “power descends from heaven to earth,” Sahlins writes, “human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another.” The charisma of politicians is always given by the gods, such as the mana handed down to legions of Melanesian chiefs. In his essay, Sahlins touches upon the interesting point that hubris, or overstepping the boundaries between the human and the divine, also underlies structures of class, with elites often seen as possessing or appropriating spirit-power. In turn, any emancipatory movement must mobilize the metahuman as “the necessary precedent of political action.”

Quite so. The Communists, who followed Marx's misunderstanding of all this, nevertheless ended up appointing "scientific materialism" to the role of explaining the necessary, unavoidable workings out of a dialectic embedded in humanity's material evolution -- what our own political left likes to call "the arc of history." Thus History, and Science, become the metahuman powers watching over our destiny and motivating us along towards it. 

If the exercise of political power is always hubris, then the mythic forms says that the exercise of power is always punished. More, that this punishment is a matter of divine justice, a restoration of the proper relationship between the human and the divine. Certainly as a matter of empirical fact all such human political powers collapse and are brought low. Christianity speaks of Christ the King, who will come and exercise such power directly and properly as a divine figure for whom it is not hubris, the only sort of rule that could even be imagined to last forever. 

Election Followup

So the activists swept the contests; apparently those big money donations really help you in getting your name out. For the example I gave yesterday, the activist won by almost 70/30.

This means that the state government is condemned to remain in chaos unless there's a wave election in November that allows one side's activists to dominate the whole government, which will merely push the chaos off until the counter-wave election to follow. 

Michigan made news when, on its election day, "Uncommitted" got 100,000 votes, 13% of the total. This was supposed to be because of Muslims in Dearborn voting in protest of the war against Hamas. However, North Carolina put up 88,000 "No Preference" votes -- 12.68% of the total -- in spite of having a statewide Muslim population of only about one percent. In my county, "No Preference" was 19.43% of the Democratic vote with a zero-percent Muslim population and no evidence of other Hamas-supporting communities in the area. 

I infer, then, that there's a much bigger issue -- looking across the several states that voted yesterday, I see that Biden got into the 90+% range in only a few of them. Even in states like ours, which refused to allow any of the other candidates running for the Democratic nomination onto the ballot, he's not breaking 90% while running unopposed in his own party's primary.

The school board races were lost by conservative candidates across the board, but the schools here are so bad that there's no saving them anyway. Besides, the chief problem they face is not ideology but immigration: they have now to deal with an exploded and unplanned-for population that brings no extra tax base with it to accommodate further school development. 

That's a problem with no solutions. Every other area of governance also faces increased costs associated with the migration, without an increase in the tax base that would allow them to offset those costs and in a terrible economy in which inflation has eaten up any ability of the existing base to sustain more taxes. At some point we'll have to start doing triage on what the government can actually do, in the context of a government led by warring activists who are opposed to compromise. 

Wednesday Motivation

 A metal version of Anvil Of Crom to get you over the midweek point.

Nasty Dan

There’s a chance you might not know this one either. 

The Chicken in Black

 I never knew this existed until this evening.

An Injustice

A paramedic is being sent down for five years for miscalculating a dose during an emergency. 

Peter Cichuniec on Friday was sentenced to five years in prison. But Cichuniec was not the officer who first physically accosted McClain within 10 seconds of exiting a patrol car, despite that no crime had been reported and that McClain had no weapon.... Nor was Cichuniec one of the two officers who joined Woodyard shortly thereafter, helping him forcibly subdue and arrest McClain, notwithstanding the fact that they had not met the constitutionally required standard to do so....

Cichuniec, who didn't arrive until about 11 minutes later, was the lead paramedic, ultimately administering too large a dose of a sedative after miscalculating McClain's size and hearing from police that McClain was allegedly experiencing "excited delirium".... while it remains unclear what exactly caused McClain to go into cardiac arrest, an amended autopsy attributes McClain's death to "complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint."

So, we can't say for sure that his action caused the death; the action was at most an error; the error was brought on by poor information given him by responding officers; and those officers had also assaulted the victim. 

I realize that being able to administer drugs is a significant responsibility, but this seems to me like an extraordinary injustice. Paramedics work extremely hard to receive a credential that merely allows them to work harder than nurses in worse conditions for less money. They are a crucial link the chain of emergency medicine, the difference between basic and advanced life support while you are being transported to a hospital. 

We should not be sending them to prison for mistakes, which is not to say that there shouldn't be accountability for mistakes. Accountability need not entail sending a paramedic to prison for having screwed up a dosage because he was given bad information at a chaotic scene. 

The Reason article notes that the police received far less accountability for their actions, which has been a hot button for some years now. I'll leave the police issue to the side. This isn't how a decent society should treat a paramedic even if he made a deadly error.

Super Tuesday

I can't recall ever being less excited to vote in an election. My normal heuristic for primaries -- vote against every incumbent, according to the apocryphal Mark Twain quote that 'politicians like diapers should be changed frequently, and for the same reason' -- has been disabled by a lack of competition in seats with incumbents. Instead, the only competitive races in this year's Democratic Primary in North Carolina are to fill seats that will be empty.

Thus, a new heuristic for this primary election: always vote against the activist. For example: 

On Tuesday, voters will also choose between two Democrats seeking their party’s nomination for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Currently that seat is occupied by Justice Allison Riggs, a voting rights attorney who was appointed to fill a vacancy on the court by Gov. Roy Cooper in 2023. Riggs has said she is not just running her race, but campaigning to build a pipeline so Democrats can win back control of the high court in 2028. Riggs’ campaign received more than $80,000 in individual donations in the first quarter of 2024. She ended that reporting cycle with more than $178,000 in the bank.

Riggs’ opponent in the primary is Lora Cubbage, a former prosecutor who also worked in the Attorney General’s Office handling workers’ compensation claims before becoming a Superior Court judge. Cubbage received about $50,000 in individual donations. Among them: a $250 donation from Brent Barringer, husband of state Supreme Court Associate Justice Tamara Barringer, a Republican. She also received $250 from Robert Broadie, a Superior Court judge in Davidson and Davie counties. Cubbage had about $90,000 left in the bank as of mid-February.

The activists come in two varieties, both of them bad. The first variety is a party loyalist who is lying about having activist principles -- Republican voters will be very familiar with this type -- but merely wants to court large campaign donations from organizations outside the state. These people, in other words, are corrupt. America has a surplus of corrupt politicians already; no more are wanted.

The second variety is a true believer in the activism that has washed over the Democratic Party. These people are not corrupt, and indeed are well-meaning according to their lights. The problem is that the activist ideas are often barking mad; even when they are not, they are destructive to the foundations of our society. 

Too, North Carolina is politically quite divided. No activist politics is going to lead to sustainable progress on any issue. Even now the governor vetoes almost every bill the legislature passes, while the state Supreme Court reverses its predecessor and finds 'unconstitutional' things constitutional, while rethinking their predecessors' decisions on the constitutional to find those things unconstitutional. It is chaos and madness. The only effective politics the Democratic Party could engage in here is one focused on non-activist, traditional Democratic ideas about improving life for workers and supporting labor. What they want to do is chase Google Gemini's vision -- because, it should be said, Google and similar tech firms are now major donors to the Democratic Party.

Indeed the two parties support the same basic interest, which is the megacorporation(s?*) that own(s?*) everything. The Republican Party supports the Chamber of Commerce interest in lowering American wages and increasing competition by increasing immigration, which by coincidence also creates a labor base that has no legal status -- and thus no legal recourse when abused. The Democratic Party supports, well, the same thing. They used to be on the side of labor, which would hotly oppose being driven out of work and having their wages effectively lowered by being put into competition with illegal aliens; now they promise welfare leading to a 'universal basic income' for former workers, who will be replaced by the class of people lacking legal standing to seek redress for their grievances.

I don't know how much good can still be accomplished with elections. However, I shall do my duty as a citizen, and vote strategically as best as I can.

UPDATE: I voted "No Preference" for President, which is not strictly speaking true but was the only option given.

* The question intended by the "(s?)" has to do with whether or not there is an important separation between the megacorporations given that their stock is chiefly owned by each other. As a result they all share the same basic interests politically, and thus rather than being in competition often end up looking like the different branches of a monopoly. Legally they are different "persons," but actually they look a lot like a monolith. Can't vote your way out of that one, either.

"We Must Dissolve [The Supreme Court]"

So says Keith Olbermann, on the X platform, following a unanimous ruling from all wings of a divided Court on a contentious topic.

I have long argued that Twitter (as it was formerly known) was the worst thing to happen to American self-governance. It offers just enough room for snarky, disrespectful, or explosive comments, and not nearly enough room to engage seriously with problems. As a result, it transformed the national discourse into a series of insults and contemptuous speech, and gave the elites a platform to air their disdain for each other and everything else. 

Maybe I should rethink my position. Getting all this contempt and disdain out in the open is probably the worst thing for keeping the country together; but it might be healthy, insofar as it destroys the very institutions that the elite were using to control us all. Keith Olbermann used to be considered a serious man, an heir to Walter Crokite and the other powerful-and-serious news anchors of the previous century. Now everyone can see him and his business for the jokes that they are.

The Supreme Court, like it or hate it, is the last branch of the Federal government that is unambiguously legitimate. Only the one justice appointed by Biden, whose election was illegal and therefore unconstitutional, is tainted by the recent tomfoolery with elections. The other eight were appointed and confirmed by governments whose legitimacy to do so was not in question. The whole Federal bureaucracy derives its power by delegation from the President, sometimes supported by Congressional legislation that supports its creation and existence. The "fortification" of our elections thus calls the legitimacy of the whole into question, except for the Supreme Court. If you could dissolve the last branch with clear authority, what would be left to convince anyone to obey the dictates of the state? 

Force, obviously: naked force. Olbermann nevertheless believes that it is his opponents who are "fascists." 

Nice try

As Ed Morrisey says, "the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments exist to limit states' powers, not to add to them." The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Colorado's attempt to use the 14th Amendment to remove Trump from the state's presidential ballot.

This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.

Gateway Drugs to Country Music

Fair Warning: I don't think there is any actual country music in this post.

 

Ferocity

Congratulations to the dog, whose name is also Conan (Gaelic: "Little wolf"), on surviving to his first birthday.

Gigantic Melancholies

The other day AVI had a post on self-observation. AVI himself raised the issue that it can tie one in knots, and is 'no picnic.' Although he comes down in favor of self-observation and self-criticism, this comment by JM Smith stood out to me:

I'd add that self-examination has morbid and healthy forms.... Morbid self-examination is one form of what traditional psychology called melancholy. I'm innately melancholic and this has always been weakeneing.

Naturally this reminded me of the introduction Robert E. Howard wrote for his Conan:

Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Conan too was weakened by his melancholies. As a literary figure, they provide us with the adagio moments that counterbalance the allegro and fortissimo aspects of the tales.  As a living being, however, they are not desirable moments to live out. 

It may also be that they aren't helpful. Joanne Jacobs, writing about educating the young, mentions that children are easily bogged down by being asked to reflect on negative feelings. This may account for some of the degredation of early education (along, of course, with the bad educational theories that have come to predominate). But she ends here, talking about adults:

By the way, at least for adults, dancing, jogging, yoga, lifting weights and aerobics are "as effective as cognitive behaviour therapy – one of the gold-standard treatments for depression," writes researcher  Michael Noetel on Conversation.

That, I think, is correct. Years ago, writing at BlackFive, I advised veterans with PTSD to take up horseback riding for its positive effects, one of which is making you stop thinking about the war and focus on the horse and the world around you. Getting out of your head and being in the moment is extremely healthy -- riding motorcycles also has this effect. 

Another of the helpful effects of horseback riding is learning to encounter and make peace with an entirely different kind of mind, which has the capacity to improve your ability to deal with people who are different from yourself as well. The self-mastery that is necessary to work with a horse often involves stopping thinking, stopping feeling, and focusing on the necessity of doing. Later, when you have time to think and feel again, you've done the things that needed doing in the moment. 

For those of us who are overly inclined to self-observation and criticism, these may be the most helpful things to learn. For those who are utterly not inclined to it, they may yet benefit from being taught to ask searching questions. If you are a man of gigantic melancholies, however, it may be helpful to lift more weights and ride more horses. 

Songs from my Father’s Atlanta

Dad moved to Atlanta in the early 1970s to work for Southern Bell after he got out of the Army. These are the kind of songs he would have heard there at that time. 

Antiquity

Just to illustrate the longetivity of this casting scheme, I'd like to tell a funny story that was told to me nearly thirty years ago by a professor of political science. 

He was a young man (at the time), and appropriately liberal for an academic in the social sciences. Naturally, he was supportive of one of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. Therefore he went to hear Jackson speak at Emory University while Jackson was in Atlanta to campaign. It is important to the story to note that the professor was white.

Now in that election cycle, the form of "white rural rage" that was in vogue was called "the angry white man," who was of course typically rural and archetypically Southern. 

Unfortunately for our protagonist, the night Jackson spoke our professor had a plane he had to catch, so he could only attend part of the speech. He listened raptly until his watch informed him that it was time to go if he was to get to the airport and catch his plane. 

Just as he checked his watch, though, by coincidence Jackson shifted into the part of the speech aimed at "the angry white man." Nervously our hero sat on the bench for a couple of minutes longer than he'd planned in the hope that the topic would change again, but it was clear that Jackson was settling in to deliver a long oratory on the subject.

And so, with intense embarrassment, our professor had to stand up and walk out of that speech -- a white Southern male, with all the hateful eyes of the congregation upon him.

Charged with being Guilty

I keep pointing out the Joe Bob Briggs lecture called "How the Rednecks Saved Hollywood," in which he explains that once you couldn't make cowboy-and-indian flicks because of guilty feelings and the Nazi war movies were getting old, Hollywood settled on rural white Americans as the designated villain for all of its stories. The reason I keep pointing this out is that the rest of the culture followed suit, and just keeps making the same movie over and over.

New book: White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy.

Tom, we'll start with you: why are white rural voters a threat to American Democracy?

Tom: We lay out the four-fold threat...

1) They're the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-gay...

2) They're the most conspiracist group, Qanon support, election-denialism...

3) Anti-democratic sentiments; they don't believe in an independent press... white nationalist, Christian nationalist...

4) Most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful...

In fairness the Native Americans had to endure decades of being the designated villians before anybody started making movies that attempted to treat them fairly or sympathetically (like 1948's Fort Apache or 1953's Hondo) and even longer before they began to enjoy being represented wholly positively (probably the 1960s with Little Big Man, but definitely it became the standard after 1990s Dances With Wolves -- ironically both named after the white character in the film). 

Likewise, just as Hollywood employs very few Southerners to play villanious Southerners -- the racist Texan sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit was played by Jackie Gleason of Brooklyn, New York -- a lot of the "Indians" in the old films were just white guys with painted faces. Hondo's Vittorio, the noble Apache leader, was played by an Australian of English descent. You not only can't expect fair representation, you can't expect representation.

All of these charges are tendentious formulations at best, but they're central casting's role for us. This is the only role we're going to be offered, and if we won't play it they'll find someone who will -- probably FBI agents dressed up like "white nationalists" with khakis and tiki torches, or "Christian nationalists" with bibles, or whatever name focus-groups well this cycle. 

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi finds that this trope is far older than I had realized.

Legislative versus Judicial

The Supreme Court's questioning on this 'bump stock' case suggests that they're getting bogged down on the question of whether there should be a law against bump stocks. That's not really the issue in the case, and it's not the Supreme Court's business to legislate. The issue in the case is whether the President or an executive agency can change the law by fiat without the bother of consulting the legislative branch.

Cargill’s attorneys emphasize that for nearly a decade, between 2008 and 2017, the federal government did not count later versions of the devices — without the internal spring — as machine guns. During that time, Americans bought 520,000 bump stocks.

President Donald Trump’s bump stock ban gave owners until March 2019 to destroy or turn over their devices. Gorsuch and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh expressed concern about the possibility that a half-million people could be prosecuted if they purchased the devices before the rules changed. But Fletcher sought to reassure them that ATF does not have the power to make something a crime that was not a crime before.

Well, indeed, and neither does the Court. 

The Court instead chose to question why someone would need a weapon that could fire 700-800 rounds a minute (the state originally misspoke and claimed they could fire '600 rounds a second'), which in fact they cannot do. 700-800 rounds per minute is the cyclical rate for the AR-15/M16 family of rifles, not a practical rate of fire that can actually be achieved or sustained. It's a theoretical calculation based on how fast the action can cycle; it doesn't take into account practical realities like the need to reload, or the fact that heat would melt your barrel. 

That's not the controversy at issue: the AR-15 is perfectly legal, and the M16/M4 is legal to own if you have the appropriate license. The question is whether the ATF or a president by bare executive order can change the status of a weapon from 'perfectly legal' to 'banned without a permit.' 

For the record, I think bump stocks are stupid. I would never put one on a weapon because they reduce accuracy even if they increase the rate of fire. Shot placement is what it's all about. I don't know if I'd even oppose a law designed to move bump stocks into the National Firearms Act.

However, I definitely oppose letting Federal agencies change the law without the bother of asking Congress. I'm not a big fan of Congress either, but it's their job to legislate if legislation has to be done.

Vice Falls Down

I used to enjoy Vice, back in the days when it was more like this:

For young people trying to break into TV, pitching to every other media outlet, from the BBC to Channel 4, felt like an endlessly demoralising grind. Patronising boomers would asphyxiate any remotely fun idea you dreamt up. Meanwhile, Vice was covering cannibal warlords in Liberia and sending reporters to see what it was like to do stand-up comedy on acid. It even had a dedicated drugs correspondent called Hamilton Morris!

... At its height, Vice was the most contrarian and unconventional publication out there. Much of this is owed to co-founder Gavin McInnes. He fell out with co-founder Shane Smith and left Vice in 2008, long before I was trying to become part of the cult. Still, it was undoubtedly Gavin’s irreverence that gave the magazine its unique flavour. When it launched its British edition in London in 2002, McInnes said: ‘We will have no taboos. Vice has never been about shocking people, we’re just shocking in nature.’

By the 2010s, that punk attitude forged by McInnes had attracted huge corporate interest. 

McInnes apparently went on to found the Proud Boys after he left Vice; the article thinks it was done as an ironic joke on his former employers' sudden twist to corporate-style wokeness. 

Was it the corporates' fault, though? Did they impose 'wokeness' on Vice, or did the audience come to demand it? Another article suggests the latter: it was the generational shift in what young people wanted that transformed Vice from a punk rock shop into a woke preacher, killed the fun and eventually the brand. 

The simple fact is that Vice, once an effective and witty member of the alternative media, ran up against an epochal change it was never destined to survive. The audience for alternative media still exists, but the progressive audience for alternative media does not. The dissident energy, for good or ill, has gone over to the right, where audiences, commentators and provocateurs from a wildly dissonant series of belief systems share a rather confused exile. Some dissident leftists forced out of their old niche simply go full tilt to the other extreme, some stand in proud isolation, most end up, uneasily, somewhere in the middle. But even the most principled progressive dissidents have woken up to a drastically changed audience, with very different interests and demands. Vice’s golden age of being offensive, effortlessly cool and still courted by legacy media is never coming back, and was never going to. 

The only punk rockers left are on the right.

Building the Motte

Apparently the new "white nationalism," which later became "white supremacy" (but not white supremacy the way the Klan understood it -- it just meant everything America normally does) is going to be "Christian Nationalism."  That's what we'll all be hearing about through the election, I suppose. 

Now these sorts of things are always motte and bailey attacks, so it's important to build a good motte. David French took this on in the pages of the NYT.

Anyone may disagree with Christian arguments around civil rights, immigration, abortion, religious liberty or any other point of political conflict. Christians disagree with one another on these topics all the time, but it is no more illegitimate or dangerous for a believer to bring her worldview into a public debate than it is for a secular person to bring his own secular moral reasoning into politics. In fact, I have learned from faiths other than my own, and our public square would be impoverished without access to the thoughts and ideas of Americans of faith.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

So that nicely illustrates both the motte and the bailey. The highly defensible motte is that he's only talking about radicals who want to establish some sort of theocracy in the United States in place of the First Amendment. As far as I know, there is no group of significant size attempting to revoke the Constitution in favor of a theocratic form of government. Nor would there be: there's no large church I know of that is happy enough with its own leadership to want to import it to the Federal government.

The bailey is 'of course Christians are willing to bring their diverse, deeply-felt opinions to the public square' -- as long as they don't insist that Christianity's vision win in establishing anything like enforceable laws. Of course you can feel that way, as long as we agree that the law cannot reflect your vision. 

Thus, while we're defending the bailey, everything that Christianity has a fairly stable theological opinion about is off the table for US law. The First Amendment now means that nothing that happens to align with a Christian doctrine is allowed to be a law in the United States. If you disagree, you're a Christian Nationalist. 

Well, until someone experiences some success at pushing back on that, at which point they'll retreat to the motte. Of course we're only trying to preserve the Constitution against the theocracy that no one is actually trying to establish.

UPDATE: To whit. 

The fight for religious freedoms in the United States has become progressively more intense in the last three years, as the government has been chipping away at the Establishment Clause by catering to special interest groups that champion causes like child gender mutilation, sexual grooming of children, prohibition of public prayer, and more that are antithetical to many mainstream religious doctrines. The First Amendment is first for a reason, and Thomas Jefferson was clear on the topic. The wall between the Church and the State was not created to constrain religion, but rather to constrain the government. It protects us from the government creating laws demanding a single theology; but equally prevents the government from demanding the elimination of religious practices.

They got a rabbi to write this, which underlines that these standards are mere Christian without being merely Christian. Nevertheless, having laws on moral values that are basically in accordance with doctrine will be the bailey.

A Genuinely Festive Occasion

I don't know why Google Photos is bringing these photos forward now; I haven't seen them in years. This one is from a tribal compound near Mahmudiyah, and in spite of the body armor and barely-visible rifles it was a good time. They were a family led by three brothers, one of whom was US-educated, and we felt pretty welcome and secure there. Many of the "Sons of Iraq" were former insurgents, but their militia were tribal fighters who'd always loyal to the family.

Here we're dining on boiled sheep and Iraqi bread, rice and many other good things. 

On a couch in this house I once talked with a nephew or a cousin who had studied philosophy at the University of Paris. He barely spoke English and I barely speak French, but between the two of us we had a conversation about Jeffersonian democracy. It was the most hopeful moment of my time in Iraq. 

An Evening of Live Music

The Scotsman Public House featuring live Celtic music.

“Frog Level” Brewing Company Americana. 

Back to the Scotsman for Ben & the Borrowed Band, a cover country act. 

Local funk act the Mike Rhodes Fellowship.

The Last Frontier

Although so far she's not winning many votes, Nikki Haley is leading the unnamed real estate magnate in fundraising. So too is Joe Biden running away in the political donations race.

In an environment in which inflation has drained away the ordinary person's ability to feed their families and make their bills, it's no surprise that only the rich can really donate to political campaigns. The rich are sure about where their interests lay, too, which is with the Establishment -- they may differ or perhaps not even care about which party, but the Establishment for certain.

The class difference is understandable. The real wages of average Americans did better under the real estate guy than they'd done in decades (a fact willfully obscured by including the Covid collapse in his numbers). This occurred because of two signature policies: cracking down on illegal immigration, which depresses the wages of working class Americans; and the full-throated embrace of the shale oil boom that gave America back its energy independence -- even making us a net exporter again. 

Average Americans found their gasoline bill was down, which meant all their bills were down: fuel to transport goods to market is baked into the price of everything. Meanwhile, their employers were forced to pay Americans to do the jobs that they needed done in America. That was more of the jobs than expected, too, thanks to the death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would have helped ship more jobs to Asia, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which also kept jobs home instead of abroad.

It's no wonder those who run major corporations would rather have an Establishment figure in office, one who will keep the borders open and costs down. They have little to fear even from Biden's environmentalism, as he has quietly allowed shale to trickle back up to where it was before.

It's also sensible that working class and middle class Americans would prefer to keep that particular tap shut, not merely for economic reasons but for more basic reasons of human meaning. The economics are aligned with their interest in stable communities, relationships, neighborhoods (as shown by the exact similarity in the complaint against gentrification as against mass immigration).

Marxist analysis would suggest that this is obvious: economics drive history, they say. It's the most basic of their analytical tools. Yet for some reason we don't really hear people talk about this in these terms: people on both sides prefer a cultural overlay to the economic analysis. It flatters the left to think that they're on the side of progress and their values, rather than the side of importing people who will be paid less and granted no worker protections in order to suppress the wages of fellow Americans in service to the rich. It flatters the right to think they are standing up for Christianity and Western traditions instead of a fair wage and a better life for their family (those selfish things!).

So we end up talking about what everyone wants to talk about instead of this important aspect; and we end up casting aspersions on each other that are not the ones most genuinely deserved. The most true and applicable complaints are left out of the conversation.

Hilarity Ensues

Google apologizes after its new AI generated “racially diverse” images of Nazis. 

As the article explains, the diversity is limited because the AI really doesn’t like to include white people; so you can imagine the results. It would have generated everything except accurate results. 

UPDATE: Related.

El Dorado

This was one of three versions of the plot of Rio Bravo, of which the original was best but each had its charms. For example, John Wayne rode his prettiest horse in this one. 

Cf. Ivanhoe:

Having expressed himself thus confidently, he reined his horse backward down the slope which he had ascended, and compelled him in the same manner to move backward through the lists, till he reached the northern extremity, where he remain stationary, in expectation of his antagonist. This feat of horsemanship again attracted the applause of the multitude.

Horses really don’t like to do what Ivanhoe and John Wayne just did. It’s a mastery.  

Thanks Google Photos

…but this was not as festive as you might be imagining. 

Insurrection and the American Project

Johns Hopkins' Center for Gun Violence Solutions has produced yet another of the endless calls for gun control that is their purpose for existing (and source of their funding). This one asserts that gun control is necessary to control 'insurrection,' arguing against "the false narrative that the Constitution creates rights to insurrection and the unchecked public carry of firearms[.]"

Well indeed, the Constitution does not create any rights at all. The Constitution does recognize certain rights, but explicitly recognizes that there are other rights that people have which are not spelled out in its text. Balancing the natural right of rebellion with a stable government's need to be able to put down illegitimate insurrections is one of those hard tasks of governance that isn't reducible to a simple rule. "Insurrection is a right" or "insurrection is never right" are both immoral principles because they would lead either to chaos or tyranny. 

The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, explicitly recognizes the right -- and the duty -- to revolution under specific circumstances. There is no way to disentangle the American project from the Declaration of Independence, nor from the insurrection and revolution that gave rise to America and its subsequent legal forms, including the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the Center has it backwards: an attempt to violate the natural right to arms would, by itself, justify a revolution. It is a basic violation of natural rights to disarm a population in order to render them subjects.

Fortunately the Center is as wrong pragmatically as it is theoretically; the estimates of AR-15s in American hands alone runs to one-in-twenty households, or perhaps 44 million spread across this vast  nation. The resources do not exist to strip even that one rifle out of American hands, not if every police agency in the country turned their hands to the project at the expense of all else. If you called up the whole of the US military and put them to doing it, each servicemember would need to collect 22 rifles apiece. If you drafted the whole population of age for it, they'd still each need to bring in three -- and that's assuming that the whole population was willing to be drafted into such a program. 

Give it up. The ship has sailed. You live in an armed society, and also one of the most peaceful on earth: much of the United States has a murder rate of zero.

More Such Apparent Impropriety

It's hard not to see New York's actions against a certain political candidate and real estate magnate as similarly apparently improper. This is especially true given that the governor has assured other real estate magnates in the state that they won't be held to the same standard. This isn't a new standard of law that applies to all people equally, it's just the particular stick the state has chosen to beat this one guy.

That appears to a layman to be a violation of the 8th and 14th amendments -- "excessive bail" and "excessive fines" are both plainly forbidden, as is a state depriving a person of the equal protection of the laws -- and arguably Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 ("No bill of attainder," although this was a judicial action rather than a legislative one it serves the same purpose).

The apparent purpose of this is to not only to punish him for his political activity, but to hamper his pursuit of further office by tying up his personal wealth. I would say that this appeared to be extraordinarily corrupt except, of course, that it's only one of several similar actions ongoing at the same time in courts around the country. 

The Appearance of Impropriety

So if you are facing an impeachment inquiry based on the testimony of an FBI informant, why not just arrest him and charge him with lying? That disrupts his credibility, makes him unavailable to testify to Congress, and lets you counterattack on the charges facing you and your son.

Why not? Well, usually because of the appearance of impropriety.

The appearance of impropriety is a phrase referring to a situation which to a layperson without knowledge of the specific circumstances might seem to raise ethics questions. 

I don't really need to be convinced that an FBI informant might be lying; rats are rats. When you try to silence him instead of rebutting his testimony, though....

NYT: "No One Deserves Citizenship"

I think that the idea of citizenship is very difficult for progressives because it entails a created difference between human beings that allows for unequal treatment. This piece begins with an example that tries to create emotional weight on the question, suggesting that it's just nonsensical to treat two children of one parent differently because of which side of a border they were born upon. 

She ends up framing the core argument thus: "After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?"

The immigration issue ends up blurring what is really the core issue. My family has been in America since before the Founding. In every generation it has paid its taxes, fought its wars, built its infrastructure, elected its officers, served in its institutions. That's why I deserve citizenship.

Others families came later but have similarly been involved. Some were imported as slaves, and deserve citizenship partly in recompense for that. Other families crossed the seas and joined America afterwards, and earned for their children a place among us. 

Someone new, from somewhere else, has no similar claim. There is another road -- migration -- that is sometimes open according to particular rules. I agree some of those rules don't make sense: for example, I don't think it's sensible to extend citizenship to a child whose parents have no established connection to the nation, just because they happen to be on US soil at the time of birth. 

Citizenship is earned, though, and it is deserved. It is just as sensible to defend the rights, privileges, and opportunities of your fellow citizens as it is to defend the interests of your family members. Indeed, as Aristotle points out, the polity is an outgrowth of the families that came together to form it. It is our country in the same way that it is our family.

The rights that are particular to citizenship have that status because they are part of governance. We defend everyone's freedom of speech or thought because those are human rights that everyone should have. The right to vote or to serve on a jury is about how Americans govern themselves, and that is American business. It belongs to those of us who have earned it, because we are part of the families that came together to form the nation. 

Experiencing Eternity and the Divine II

Last week's post in response to James' post garnered an interesting discussion, with Tom entering in towards the end to add the Orthodox perspective. What came out of that was a recognition for me that, while the Catholic Church incorporated Neoplatonic ideas early and then found a way to modify its theology later to accomodate Aristotelian ideas, the Orthodox are essentially applying Neoplatonism's approach to Christianity directly. 

This concept that Tom is talking about, theosis, involves using the parts of ourselves that are 'like' God as a road to returning to God. In Greek philosophy, that part is the energia or activity as opposed to the matter: the word form is also sometimes used to translate the concept. Matter is ordered and structured so that it becomes a table or a dog or a particular human being, and the order is a kind of activity imposed on the matter. 

(An aside: This 'order is an activity' is really true, too, at least for organisms -- Jonas' point -- because what it is to be an organism is to be an activity of taking matter from the world, as by eating or breathing, and organizing it in to the form that is also yourself.)

Since God is (incompletely) conceived of as pure energia, in that sense we have 'the image of God' in ourselves, and that likeness provides a bridge to the divine which we can follow. 

Wikipedia helpfully draws out how this Orthodox concept differs from the strict Neoplatonic approach.

Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis: even as it is not possible for any created being to become God ontologically, or even a necessary part of God (of the three existences of God called hypostases), so a created being cannot become Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit nor the Father of the Trinity.

Most specifically creatures, i.e. created beings, cannot become God in his transcendent essence, or ousia, hyper-being (see apophaticism). Such a concept would be the henosis, or absorption and fusion into God of Greek pagan philosophy. However, every being and reality itself is considered as composed of the immanent energy, or energeia, of God. As energy is the actuality of God, i.e. his immanence, from God's being, it is also the energeia or activity of God. Thus the doctrine avoids pantheism while partially accepting Neoplatonism's terms and general concepts, but not its substance (see Plotinus).

To put it even more simply, Iamblicus or Plotinus thought that the matter was just another spun-out emanation from the One, and thus that everything that had proceeded from the One could (would!) return to it. Iamblicus, the later thinker, worked out a mode for attempting to approach the One by seeking grace from those spin-offs that were closer to the One than we are ourselves. This system of seeking grace from an intermediary to help you come closer to the One is obviously readily adaptable to seeking the Father through the Son, whose being is closer to God -- he is God -- but also more like us than the Father because the Son is also man.

The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent article on Neoplatonism that comes from a contemporary, skeptical perspective. 

The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.... 

Today, the Neoplatonic system may strike one as lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible, but to dismiss it out of hand is difficult, especially if one is prepared to take seriously a few fundamental assumptions that are at least not obviously wrong and may possibly be right.

Indeed, Einstein's revision of Newtonian physics began with a return to Plato and Platonic ideas; the problem is always that these ideas strike modern thinkers as 'lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible,' but that they often turn out to be right. Jonas too, as I said in the aside above, is really restating a truth that the Greeks had apprehended, even if Plato and Aristotle differed on how to apply it. 

So it might be worth starting with that article on Neoplatonism, so we can get a sense of what the different Christian churches were bringing forward in their two very different ways. It is a very fertile field, one that produces almost every time it is sought. 

Who Thought They'd Get as far as Lincoln?

The Great Emancipator's statue is now on the chopping block.

A Flattering Afternoon

Today I went to the Asheville Celtic Festival to see Albannach. The Festival has a mini-Highland Games out back, and many of my Strongman friends participate. I knew my friend Noel would be competing so I went out to see him on the sidelines. He hugged me and introduced me to the other competitors. 

While we were talking, the announcer saw me with him and started announcing to the crowd, “I see the stonelifters have started moving in! I don’t know if there’s a connection between lifting stones and ugliness, but if so it’s in full effect today!” Then he came over and hugged me too. 

Finally one of the Master Strongmen came over and asked me how old I was. I told him, and he said, “Dude, you’re thick as ****! You should be competing!” Noel explained our friendship and that turned into a nice conversation. 

I love the Strongman community, which dovetails with the Scottish Heavy athletics. It’s a great community of mutual respect, support, and friendship. 

Cognition tools

A Vagueness Problem

There's a longstanding debate about what it means for music to be "country music." Country music is a genre unto itself, with several sub-genres, and unsurprisingly there is a vagueness problem about some of the fringe cases. That is to say, there are plenty of clear-cut cases where nobody would argue that it's not country -- Johnny Cash doing Folsom Prison Blues, George Jones singing The Grand Tour (saddest song ever recorded, if you ask me), plenty of these. 

Likewise, there's plenty of stuff you can stay definitely is not country music, like The Cure or Beethoven. It's music, and Beethoven at least is great music, but without question it's not country music.

Vagueness problems come in when there's movement along the substratum between X and not-X. At first you have a clear-cut case of X and you know that it's X; later, you may be aware of some things that are not-purely-X in a case of X; later still, you may no longer be sure the thing is X at all. After a while, you'll be pretty sure it's not-X, and eventually totally sure. The problem lies in those cases where the vagueness blurs the categories in a way that can make knowledge of the truth uncertain. (That model of vagueness, and for that matter of knowledge, is philosopher Timothy Williamson's).

We are presented this week with a vagueness case, as the pop star known as Beyonce has released what she is pleased to describe as a country song. The question of what makes a song "country music" is thus relevant again.

I have not heard the song. I don't think I've ever heard a song by Beyonce; she's ordinarily operative in a part of the music world I actively dislike (which is not to say that I actively dislike the musicians or people involved: it's just the music I definitely don't like). Regular readers are aware that I think popular music is significantly degraded over the last few decades, replaced by a kind of publicity stunt without the merits of earlier popular music. An occasional topic of this blog is finding the better music that is being produced but not publicized. 

Beyonce is one of those acts that is the product of a contemporary publicity machine. For example, apparently this song was announced by an advertisement on the Super Bowl, itself a publicity machine product, which would have cost millions of dollars. It was accompanied by a photo-shoot designed to move eyebrows -- I mean eyeballs -- which was also placed in a tweet that was pushed by journalists across many outlets. You could be forgiven for thinking that prima facie this won't have much to do with country music's traditional themes of hardscrabble rural life, for example.

As country music outlet WhiskeyRiff puts it, however, the vagueness problem isn't limited to her anyway.

And while I know there will be, and already have been, complaints about the fact that this “isn’t a country song” and Beyoncé “isn’t a country artist,” I’d say the vast majority of what’s heard on country radio isn’t exactly that, either, so this really isn’t any different in my opinion.

As a side note, she’s also been rocking a cowboy hat pretty regularly since the Grammy’s, if that gives you any indication on the marketing aspect[.]

That's a very fair point. Given what Nashville is pushing, why not Beyonce? Dolly Parton has even suggested it, having just done her own adventure into rock music.

Given that it's Friday night, after the jump I'll include some videos playing with the question of what is and is not real country music, as well as another vagueness case by the Rolling Stones.

A Note of Sanity

This is a unique moment as far as I can recall, having followed this debate for decades: a sane and salient point on the viability of mutual defense by the citizenry, coupled with an admission that the very vast majority of guns are kept responsibly. 

Didn’t you feel a twinge of something deeply gratifying — and inspiring — in the way ordinary crowd members chased down a suspected gunman and collectively smothered him? They undertook momentary personal risk and sacrifice and then found greater safety in numbers, as helper after helper piled on until the suspect disappeared under their collective weight.

That’s real authority, and it didn’t come from a law or a cop.

....

There is no easy resolution to the gun debate. It’s estimated that there are about 398 million guns in the United States, and about 397.9 million of them are kept peaceably and responsibly for home protection or sport. Maybe gun haters need to start talking to those gun owners as allies rather than enemies.

The author apparently is a sports journalist rather than an opinion columnist as a rule, and that may be why she is able to see the issue more clearly. Those reared to produce commentary on this topic have been taught clear lines, but her fresh eyes are far clearer.  

Recycling Deceptions

Our county has "staffed recycling centers" where you can bring your trash for free,* provided that you have separated the recycling. Recycling has to be separated into aluminum/steel cans and plastic bottles. I've always suspected this was a scam of some sort -- aluminum is the only thing that is really cost-effective to recycle, but it's easily separated from the steel with electromagnets. 

Turns out it's a bigger scam than I realized.

* "At no additional charge in addition to your substantial taxes." Nothing is free.

Doon in th’ Borders

The town of Jedburgh is having its ball game today.

The Jethart Ba', which looks like a game of street rugby, dates back hundreds of years. It's believed to have been derived from the game of football - and is said to have originally been played using the head of an Englishman.

There aren't too many rules!

Februum

The word February comes down to us from a Latin word for a purification or a means of such. Apparently the Latin spelling was reintroduced in English in the 14th century, alongside the Hundred Years War with France, driving out the French spelling that had been standard until then. 

But what is a febrvvm? Apparently it could be almost anything. 

According to Ovid’s poem Fasti, pretty much anything that people used to purify something else was known as februa (the plural form of februum). Houses were purified with “roasted grain and salt,” land was purified with strips of animal hide, priests wore crowns made of leaves from trees, and so on.

This is the date of the purification festival Lupercalia, which was the racy precursor to St. Valentine’s Day in the same way that the Saturnalia was the racy precursor to Christmas. 

Open Source

Waiting to fly out of AVL airport today, I saw an F-22 launch from this non-military field. The airport bartender said she’s been seeing a lot of them just lately. Even more Chinooks. 

That is suggestive. Not definitive, but suggestive. 

Dallas

I'm taking a short trip to Texas tomorrow. I don't know that any of you regulars are in Dallas, but I'll be in town for one night only if you are. 

The Usual Gaslighting, Please

A woman brought an AR-15 to a megachurch and opened fire, fortunately not apparently knowing how to use the thing very well. The Washington Post reports:

Moreno’s motive remained unclear Monday[.]

That is interesting, because the rifle is supposed to have been equipped with a "Free Palestine" message. That didn't make the Washington Post's reporting. We may never know why this troubled woman would randomly carve those words into a rifle she was intending to turn into a murder weapon.

They did report on Texas' gun laws, which they don't even know if she broke.

She had previously been convicted or pleaded guilty in the Houston area to misdemeanor assault, fraud and drug charges, records show.

Some misdemeanor convictions bar people from legally buying guns in Texas, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether Moreno’s convictions would have. The state has few restrictions on gun purchases, with no firearm sales registry, no required waiting period to buy a gun and no red-flag law guarding against mentally ill or violent people having weapons.

So, really, they were basically asking for it. 

The Post did come up with this, at least: 

Moreno at times used a male first name, Jeffrey, and listed her sex as both male and female in records. It was not clear whether Moreno identified as transgender.

It's probably also unclear if she -- as the Post identifies her -- was using any drugs as "therapy" for this issue. By tomorrow we'll be assured that is a non issue even if it were so, assuming anyone is still even reporting on the case. Those Texas gun laws, though...

UPDATE: Vice is on schedule. 

Chaos

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat. 

A Partial Revision

A recent post was titled "The Uselessness of International Institutions." It turns out, however, that the UN did manage to be useful in a way: as a shield for one of Hamas' headquarters, which turns out to have been located physically beneath their own headquarters in Gaza. 

Another thing to consider when evaluating these institutions' condemnations and judgments. They turn out to have taken sides in the conflict they are presuming to judge, indeed are so committed to one side that they were willing to serve as human shields to protect its nerve center.

Experencing Eternity and the Divine

James put up a post a few days ago that I think is very worthy, as is AVI's comment there. I did not myself comment upon it at the time, but it dovetails with a work of philosophy I am rereading after several years. You should read both James and AVI before continuing with this one.

Hans Jonas was a German-born American philosopher, and his classic is The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. He lived at the time of the second world war, in which he fought in both Italy and Germany. He wrote on Gnosticism and what is called existentialism; in fact, I think he derived a Neoplatonic metaphysics for himself without appearing to realize it. 

The early parts of the book are already concerned with theology as well as biology, disposing of the "god of the mathematicians" as inadequate because such a god would have no reason to favor life over death and indeed no capacity to recognize that something was alive instead of dead.* He is very much concerned with the problem James and AVI are concerned with, in other words: the ability of the divine and the mortal to encounter each other, to conceptualize each other, to interact.

This problem has a long history in philosophy. It also works both ways. It is proven by Aquinas and others that humanity cannot fully comprehend the nature of God; in fact, here as elsewhere, they were following Avicenna's arguments, who was following Aristotle's. The question of how a god that exists on Aristotelian lines could even know us is a real problem in any theology that starts with Aristotle's concept of actuality versus potentiality; it is likewise in theologies (like Nicholas of Cusa's) that try to reason about the relationship by analogy to the infinite and the finite. (Nor is it clear that this is the right way to speak about a divine creator, whose work provides the ground for both the finite and all the infinities, who governs their relationships and makes possible their interactions in defiance of Zeno's objections). 

In his eleventh essay, Jonas -- who has come to view symbolic myth as 'the glass through which we see darkly' -- returns to the relationship between ourselves and the eternal, meaning God. Here he derives, apparently independently, both a Neoplatonic view of our relationship to the divine and of our "higher selves" that somehow exist in eternity but yet still in relationship with ourselves as finite and mortal creatures engaged in activity in time. 

The bridge he comes up with is the now. Now doesn't seem to have finite boundaries: it isn't extended, with a beginning and an end. It just is, and it always is, but the now that was just now is not now any longer. When we decide and act, we do it in the now. This unextended time -- which is the only real time in the sense that it is the only time in which we can and do actually exist -- is like eternity in its neverending existence, and unlike the past and future that are extended and measurable. This is the ground where, he argues, mortal and divine meet. 

From this he goes on to derive a positive ethics, by which I mean that his work is not existential after all: our essence comes first, and is derivable from what it means to be a living, conscious organism with freedom of action and this relationship with the divine. What we do in the now is written in eternity, perfects or mars our noetic selves -- the image of us in the eternal -- and this gives us a real ethical duty to do right and not wrong. 

Jonas' thinking will not fully satisfy anyone here. He believes he has disproven any sort of immortality for mortals beyond this capacity to write on eternity, or to exist as an idea in the mind of God. As a way of getting at the problem of how mortals and God can conceive of each other and interact, however, it is a thoughtful and novel approach.

* In this same essay Jonas explains something critical about the organism, that is about life, and why life is different and special. I have cited this before as a fundamental proposition in philosophical objections to abortion, discussions of agency, as well as in my commentary on Plato's Laws. It is one of the more important philosophical ideas I have encountered, and yet it emerges almost as an afterthought because what he is really interested in here is the right conception of God.