Gentlemen, No Communities Here! This is the Community Room!

In the ongoing local saga of the feud over the public library, the county commissioners are proposing to stop the community from using the community room.

The new policy states the room would be limited to library and county government uses only. The move is a part of the larger effort by Jackson County officials to establish new policies for the county’s two public libraries since its official exit from the Fontana Regional Library system that went into effect July 1....

The large community room was touted as one of the new JCPL Complex highlights during the capital campaign for the project between 2007 and 2009. Friends of the JCPL volunteer and retired school librarian Antoinette MacWatt said the room restrictions sting particularly hard given how integral the community was in fundraising for it. In total, community members raised over $1.8 million for the JCPL Complex project, while the county provided the remaining $7 million needed to renovate the historic 1914 courthouse.

“That’s something that’s been, really, a point of pride for this community that we were able to raise that much money,” MacWatt said. “It feels a little bit like a slap in the face.”

Since the other $7MM was also provided by the community, in the form of taxes, you can see why people might be a little annoyed at being told that they can't use a room that was built for the express purpose of providing a community room. 

Note that this does not apply to all libraries in the county, however. Just the one in the problematic blue city of Sylva. In the upscale vacation-and-second-home town of Cashiers, there will be no restrictions. The Smoky Mountain News has the good grace to call this 'puzzling.' 

Part of what is so puzzling about the new restrictions proposed at the JCPL is that no such restrictions are proposed in the draft policy for the community room at the Albert Carlton Cashiers Community Library that was also presented to commissioners at last week’s meeting.

In the proposed Carlton Cashiers library policy, there are no restrictions on who can rent out the community room for any permitted uses, including meetings, private celebrations, art shows and “other similar and appropriate uses approved by the county manager,” though library and county government employees would be prioritized over other groups.

No one is really puzzled about this. As I've mentioned, the library has been the #1 issue locally for years and multiple election cycles now. The Republicans who have taken over the county commission view the Sylva library as dangerous to the moral health of the people of the county, likening the regulation they think it needs to the alcohol board's control of the sale of strong spirits. Part of what drove the current commissioners to seek office was a desire to destroy the library as a source of what they see as moral rot.

The Cashiers library, by contrast, is in a very rich part of the county surrounded by golf courses and gardens. They are so comfortable there that this is where the Republican party held its debates during the primaries, even without the threatened ID checks and pepper spray for errant Democrats who might try to attend.

These feuds are getting to the point that they're destroying the goods the institutions were set up to create or preserve. However, so far people seem to prefer to blame the other side and concentrate on winning than to figure out how to restore the goods. 

The Odyssey Is Just a Travel Guide to Dining in the Med

 So here are some recipes and food parts of the story.

What a trip, though.

Ancient Fires

A site in the Levant offers extensive evidence of long-burning communal fires. 

On The Odyssey

The forthcoming movie treatment of Homer's epic has generated a lot of commentary, from most of which I dissent. I thought, for example, that Elliot/Ellen Page would have been an excellent choice for Achilles in the Odyssey, as in the Odyssey Achilles is dead. We don't meet Achilles in the Odyssey, we meet the Shade of Achilles. The treatment is largely a meditation on the passing of mortal glory for a hero who was once thought the greatest of men, and has now been unmanned by death. Though Page's situation is different, the actor is better fit than many to fill such a role. 

I do agree with this Chronicles suggestion that you should probably encounter Homer's Odyssey itself before seeing the movie. I dissent a bit from the suggestion as to how.

I’d like to urge those interested in the film to read An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, a 2017 memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn. Of course, you can also read Homer’s The Odyssey itself. Yet if you are looking for a brilliant exploration of the ancient poem, An Odyssey can’t be topped. 

Over the course of my life I've spent a lot of time with Odysseus, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also as Plato treats him in the Lesser Hippias and the Laws. I agree with the suggestion to pursue the encounter; not to read anything. 

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of oral epic poetry. They are meant to be heard, not read. You will find them shockingly more engaging if you listen to an audiobook version aloud rather than trying to sit down with a huge tome and read it. If you develop a taste for the form, as I did in my youth, I recommend The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord, based upon the research of his mentor, Milman Parry.

There is a lot of discussion about which translation into English is best; much recent commentary dislikes the 'feminist' translation referenced by the director, although I have frankly heard good things about it from academics I know. Dad29 recommended a different one a few years ago, which I reviewed very briefly. I retain my opinion that the Fitzgerald is the best in English. Here is an unabridged audiobook: it is ten hours of your life, well-spent.

If any of you are interested, here are some things I've written at the Hall on the topic:

The debate within the Lesser Hippias, which is also in praise of disagreeable men like myself.

A discussion of Odysseus' invocation by Plato in the Laws.

Also from the commentary on the Laws, a comparison of Conan and Odysseus -- as well as a discussion of piracy!

More Mottes and Baileys

Since I know several of you don't read Instapundit, here is something they linked overnight on variations of the Motte and Bailey fallacy, as identified by the originator of that very useful term. 

Harmeet

Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon gets a nice writeup at Hot Air, covering several of her (many!) current activities.

EN I.3 and the ICE Shooting Deaths

In the discussion of the post below on ICE shooting two more people recently, Thomas Doubting expressed concerns that the media treatment of ICE meant that we can't expect the matter to be handled fairly in the press. That turns out to provide a practical example for the application of Nicomachean Ethics (EN) I.3, which I cited frequently during the discussion of the EN. 

To some degree the United States is transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society. Mostly it remains high-trust across its breadth and depth; but in certain cities now everything is locked up to prevent theft, and in politics there is deep distrust between factions. There are many costs to such a transition, and one of them is on display here. People on the right do not trust that ICE will be portrayed or treated fairly, and worry that the protests against it and obstruction of it create additional dangers that may sometimes merit (even lethal) force; people on the left do not trust that ICE will behave morally in any case, suspect it is recruited from bad people to begin with, assume any statements from the Trump administration or any of its subordinate agencies are lies, expect evidence to be hidden (or planted!), etc. 

As a result, the only way to address any of these shootings in a way that might gain broad public support for a proposed change is to conduct a thorough investigation, assemble and evaluate the evidence, and then publish the findings. Responsible people thus always call for this (Senator Collins did so in this case).

However! Because such an assembly, evaluation, etc., takes so very long, people who just want to avoid accountability and carry on misbehaving also call for such investigations. By the time the process can play out, ten or a hundred or a thousand more things will have happened. The public will have forgotten the details, also the urgency, and nothing will end up getting done. Thus, both the responsible and the irresponsible settle upon the same course of action; and the result is that nothing changes. 

The resolution of a problem like this lies in the principles expressed in I.3. 

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits[.]

So too here. When it comes to legal accountability for the shooter, of course the agent is entitled to a full investigation and -- should immunity be suspended -- a fair trial before a jury. In the subject matter of applying criminal law to past actions, that is the appropriate standard.

When it comes to deciding whether we need a safety stand-down to go over lethal force law in detail with ICE agents for a couple of weeks, with practical exercises and considerable reinforcement about the rights and laws protecting the people on the streets, we do not need such an investigation. That subject can be decided on the basis of the probability, inferred from repeated observations of this type, that such lessons would be wisely applied. The subject matter here is a current ethical decision about the best way to proceed given multiple fatal shootings of unarmed civilians by armed agents of the state.

Likewise a reconsideration of how long agents remain in training before they are deployed, armed and immune, on our streets; likewise, a reconsideration of whether immunity is a wise policy in these cases at all. 

The application of criminal law to a particular case is not the same subject as an ethical consideration about whether or not to call for a stand down for further training. A different level of certainty is appropriate to the decision. 

UPDATE: To their credit, DHS officials seem to have reached this conclusion independently.

Community Standards Differ

Via X. You probably know both songs, and some of you probably even know all the words to both songs. They are of course "Rocky Top" and "Copperhead Road." (Yes, it's an official state song, Tennessee's 11th. Home of Nashville and all that.)

Against Terror, not Arms

Here is a useful post going back to 1328. I want to pull just that one thread of it for today:

Go back to 1328. The Statute of Northampton made it illegal to go armed in public “to terrify the King's subjects.”1 This wasn’t a gun-control law in the modern sense. It's actually the origin of a distinction courts are still arguing about today: the difference between carrying lawfully and carrying to menace. (We'll come back to this. It shows up by name in the Bruen decision, 700 years later.)

Here's the statute:

Item, it is enacted, that no man great nor small, of what condition soever he be, except the King's servants in his presence, and his ministers in executing of the King's precepts, or of their office, and such as be in their company assisting them, and also [upon a cry made for arms to keep the peace, and the same in such places where such acts happen,] be so hardy to come before the King's justices, or other of the King's ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the justices or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their armour to the King, and their bodies to prison at the King's pleasure.

As the Wikipedia article points out, this was originally written in Anglo-French, the language of the court. It was really written as 'ne de chivaucher ne de daler arme.'

Now here's what Bruen said about that.

    To begin, respondents and their amici point to several medieval English regulations from as early as 1285 that they say indicate a longstanding tradition of restricting the public carry of firearms. See 13 Edw. 1, 102. The most prominent is the 1328 Statute of Northampton (or Statute), passed shortly after Edward II was deposed by force of arms and his son, Edward III, took the throne of a kingdom where “tendency to turmoil and rebellion was everywhere apparent throughout the realm.”... At the time, “[b]ands of malefactors, knights as well as those of lesser degree, harried the country, committing assaults and murders,” prompted by a more general “spirit of insubordination” that led to a “decay in English national life.”...

 The Statute of Northampton was, in part, “a product of . . . the acute disorder that still plagued England.”... It provided that, with some exceptions, Englishmen could not “come before the King’s Justices, or other of the King’s Ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in Fairs, Markets, nor in the presence of the Justices or other Ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their Armour to the King, and their Bodies to Prison at the King’s pleasure.”...

 Respondents argue that the prohibition on “rid[ing]” or “go[ing] . . . armed” was a sweeping restriction on public carry of self-defense weapons that would ultimately be adopted in Colonial America and justify onerous public-carry regulations. Notwithstanding the ink the parties spill over this provision, the Statute of Northampton—at least as it was understood during the Middle Ages—has little bearing on the Second Amendment adopted in 1791.....

 The Statute’s prohibition on going or riding “armed” obviously did not contemplate handguns, given they did not appear in Europe until about the mid-1500s.... Rather, it appears to have been centrally concerned with the wearing of armor....  

 The Statute’s apparent focus on armor and, perhaps,  weapons like launcegays makes sense given that armor and lances were generally worn or carried only when one intended to engage in lawful combat or—as most early violations of the Statute show—to breach the peace.... Contrast these arms with daggers. In the medieval period, “[a]lmost everyone carried a knife or a dagger in his belt.”... While these knives were used by knights in warfare, “[c]ivilians wore them for self-protection,” among other things. Ibid. Respondents point to no evidence suggesting the Statute applied to the smaller medieval weapons that strike us as most analogous to modern handguns.

I mention all this because North Carolina to this day has a law that exactly mirrors the 1328 statute's language. I saw a guy was charged with it locally just the other day. The caselaw here shows that the state courts consider the issue to the be terror, not the arms, and so much so that they've convicted people for 'going armed to the terror of the public' in the absence of arms. Arms in North Carolina are commonly lawfully carried, and require no permit except in the case of concealed arms (which are normally forbidden entirely, excepting only handguns for those with a permit). 

You see people carrying arms here all the time; I do myself, like the Medievals a knife in my case. That's not illegal. It's explicitly legal. What's not legal is to go armed for the purpose of terrifying the community. That part has exactly the sort of long heritage in law that the Bruen decision sets up as a legitimating condition for proposed legislation. 

Two more ICE Shooting Deaths

You probably heard about the one last week in Houston, but this morning there was another one in Maine that has mostly received local coverage so far. 

It does seem like there are a lot more of these shootings that, say, shootings by other Federal agencies. Some of us raised the issue that training was being abbreviated in order to build the ICE agent numbers rapidly, and that it raised the danger of such things happening. Details are too few in the most recent one yet to know if that was the case, but I think given the frequency and scale it's worth asking the question again. Are they getting adequate training for this task before they're being sent out there, and them with Federal immunity to boot?

Fulton County

Atlanta is suddenly invaded by hundreds of FBI agents.

Viking Invasion

Although I'm not watching any World Cup games, I am enjoying the cultural production that's coming out of it all, whether it's the Tartan Army marching on Fenway Park, travelers' tales across the US, or short AI movies like this.

It did not quite turn out that way, I hear.

Hallelujah Trail

Since I mentioned Charley Crockett very approvingly just a bit ago, I thought I might also highlight this story. Many of you will likely approve of it. 

Self-Proclaimed Devil-Worshiping Duo Twin Temple Say They Were Removed From Charley Crockett Tour Due To ‘Our Satanic Imagery’

There are more interesting reasons to drop an opening act, but not many. Self-proclaimed satanic doo wop duo Twin Temple revealed this week that “The Hallelujah Trail” country singer Charley Crockett booted them from a planned opening slot on his tour next week because of their Satan-hailing image.

“Today we were informed that Charley Crockett has decided to remove Twin Temple from his upcoming shows next week due to our Satanic imagery,” [Twin Temple said]...

“Unfortunately, that means we will not be able to perform for you next week as planned. We are really disappointed as we were looking forward to getting back out and seeing you, and also what it means as far as bringing different types of people and music lovers together,” added the rockabilly/soul group whose songs include “Lucifer, My Love,” “Sex Magick,” “Burn Your Bible,” “Let’s Have a Satanic Orgy” and “The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)” and whose most recent album was 2023’s God Is Dead.

I mean, you could hardly be clearer. Even Billy Joe Shaver said that the Devil made him do it the first time. Charley has confirmed the allegation, rather firmly.

I don't know if Charley means his song title to be reflective of the late 1960s movie, but if you've never seen it, The Hallelujah Trail is a fantastic comedy. I love it a great deal in spite of its ridiculous and insulting but very era-normal treatment of Native Americans. There was a time when I was called Oracle by a well known military unit that I won't name to avoid their embarrassment. (There was no whiskey involved for me: General Order #1. I was just good at telling them what was going to happen in the next week or two.) 

The parts I love best aren't even about that; they're about the struggle between women activists and the US military, which was already evident even at that era. It's beautifully explained and rendered, and not with any hostility to either side.

It's a great movie.

Fear of Arms

The British prime minister was given an engraved Turkish revolver, as were other visiting NATO leaders who were at the recent conference in Ankara. He left it in Turkey to be destroyed rather than bring a gun back to the UK. 

Wretchard points out: 

Gifts of presentation swords and guns (or other firearms) between heads of state have a long history in diplomacy. These items symbolize honor, alliance, martial prowess, cultural heritage, or goodwill between mighty warriors.

In rejecting the present Starmer made a negligable contribution to the reduction of firearms risk in the UK, but he sent a strong and largely negative symbolic message to the world at large and to Russia, China and the Muslim nations in particular. It conveys what Britain has become and the watching world will behave accordingly.

In addition to this, rejecting a symbolic gift from another nation is an insult. It is similar to but much worse than refusing to take the tea or coffee offered by a tribal leader when you come into his tent. Weapon-gifts are especially honorable because they transcend the offer of peace symbolized by the hospitality of tea, and convey that you are respected as one who can be trusted to be armed as well. The nation of Britain is humiliated by this action, whereas a nominal ally who needed to be reassured is insulted. 

Turns out Los Angeles Does a Pretty Good Independence Day Too

I certainly enjoyed seeing Grim's posts around Independence Day, and while I've done a few small town Independence Day events and enjoyed them thoroughly, Los Angeles actually has a pretty good time on the Fourth as well- in fact, it turns out you can see it from space, and it's spectacular:

NASA was kind enough to post this little video on X, which is where I caught it.

We live in the hills, so with the high fire danger we don't launch any fireworks ourselves, but we can go up our back hill and have a nice view out over the city and we watch the neighborhood below put on a show for us all night long.  Started before sunset and didn't end until well after midnight.  The dog's aren't so keen about it, but we enjoyed it.

For once I had something to be proud about living here in L.A. and had to post this.

He is Out, Actually

So I hear. The Party is not letting him choose his replacement. 

A nice moment of actual standards. We had to go a very long way to find the wall, but it’s there. 

It’s The Thing

If it’s got a steel guitar anyway. Funny story about that. Hawaiian thing. No obvious reason why it became so central. 

This one is solid. Boy knows what he’s doing. 

The Blue Ridge

Girl seems to understand the region.

When Veterans Have Kids

Or, at least, when Mat Best & the BRCC crew have kids ...

A Lost Documentary on the Crossing of the Delaware

"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon."

-- Napoleon Bonaparte (although he was probably quoting Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle)

Addendum to the Previous

 

America

The beautiful. 

Independence Day, 250th Edition

Dillsboro all out for the veterans' parade.

Some of the local veterans parading.

I was just mentioning the Confederate flag thing and the local pride in heritage; sure enough, a group of them came out to march. Technically, by act of Congress, Confederate soldiers are considered American veterans for certain purposes.

Happy children celebrating in the tremendous heat.

A gingerbread cupcake at the Legion hall.

The Legion gave me a nice challenge coin after the run, too.

It was dangerously hot today, so much so that on the ride back I realized it wasn't safe to continue my ride. Fortunately I was along the beautiful Tuckasegee river, so I climbed down the bank and swam until I was cool enough to resume the ride. I also soaked my shirt so it would help keep me cool for the rest of the ride.

Quite a day. The pork butt came out beautifully thanks to my wife, who took over the smoking so that I could go ride with the Legion. We did a flag replacement ceremony in Robbinsville, the last town before the Dragon. We rode through the Nantahala Gorge to get there, which is a bit out of the way but beautiful. I’d never met these people before, but they put me in the tail gunner position based I guess on the firmness of my handshake. First time I’ve ridden tail for a group ride. I hope I did a good job. 

The article on Robbinsville claims that the mean daily maximum temperature in July is 83. That mean was somewhat exceeded today.

Independence Day

Have a happy one, warriors. 

UPDATE: I got the pork butt on before dawn. It smells just like old hickory out there.

Freedom Barbecue

I'm going to smoke a pork butt for the Independence Day feast. 

I made some Christmas barbecue sauce given the significance of the occasion. This batch was thinned partly with coffee and partly with chicken stock, since I had plenty of chicken stock and not a great deal of coffee. I was also out of molasses, so I added extra dark brown sugar -- which, in commercial sugars, differs from white sugar only by the addition of extra molasses. That's now how it worked historically, but these days they render it all to white sugar and molasses, and then make light or dark brown sugar by putting some molasses back in. Cheaper and easier that way.

I'm also going to smoke some Andouille sausage tomorrow, and a snakeskin hat band I made after Conan's recent run-in. Only a little smoke for the latter, to help preserve and waterproof it. 

Yoda: "No, There Is Another."

At the NY Post today, Eric Metaxas declares the American revolution to have been 'the only one in history that worked.' 

That's wrong, but his examples aren't the wrong part. 

Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here. It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.

What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy. So they beheaded their king and queen. But the radicals didn’t stop there....

Then there are the even worse nightmares of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in Russia and China.

OK, fair as far as it goes. But the American revolution stood on the shoulders of at least two earlier revolutions that had worked: the revolt against King John by the barons who fought him at Runnymede, which produced Magna Carta; and the Scottish Revolution led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, which produced a free nation that taught the Pope to accept that men could choose their kings. 

Revolution is a risky business, to be sure. Aristotle spends a good part of the Politics explaining how states grow unstable with an eye towards avoiding revolutionary moments. They often end up being destructive.

Not always, though. The one that just occurred in Syria ended a despotic Baathist regime and at least for now seems to have moved in the direction of a better society -- the al Qaeda-linked leader seems to be moderating pretty fast, making deals with the Kurds and the Israelis alike to try to reach a more stable society. The Vietnamese revolution against the French and then us, which we thought would turn them into another Communist hellhole, actually came off all right: the Vietnamese nation is now one of our better friends in the region. The Irish revolt of 1916 produced a nation that is pretty OK, even if they did send condolences on the occasion of Hitler's death. The recent revolt in Northern Ireland's Belfast is healthy, and might help push the whole UK in a better direction eventually. 

Sometimes it's the only way to fly. The Declaration sets the terms out clearly: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes... But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

Emphasis added, though little needed. Not only a right. Sometimes, a duty.

Georgia Gets a Hard Look

The FBI has made a priority investigation out of the 2020 election there. The article treats it as an open question that might go either way; readers of the Hall know that the matter was settled some time ago, and the remaining question is one of responsibility. 

It would be encouraging to see actual consequences for this sort of thing, even for an anarchist. That a political system should be corrupt is no surprise, but watching the powerful gleefully get away with it while the press proclaims that "there is no evidence" of the corruption is -- probably intentionally -- disheartening. For those who believe that government can be a positive good, it is even more important to see consequences for this.

1976 versus 2026

There are many things I really like about 70s culture: Outlaw Country, Shovelhead choppers, proto-Metal and Punk rock, Smokey and the Bandit and its predecessors, The Muppet Show (in spite of its periodic pretenses, which were at least fresh and not so exhausted then). 

The above film from 1976 highlights some of the aspects I like a bit less. Still, it does demonstrate a way in which the Carter presidency allowed the left to embrace America in that era that is currently forbidden: if Kamala Harris had won the recent presidential election, I imagine we'd have a version of this today that was being pushed out by official channels. As this one was: this was a product of the US Information Agency. USIA would have been called the propaganda arm of the US government except that the US government formally defines propaganda as "enemy action to..." that the US itself, therefore by definition, can never perform.

Had Harris won, USAID probably would have funded the 2026 version of this instead. 

The present administration has no such professionals on its side, and any remaining within the bureaucracy certainly wouldn't contribute to celebrating America as long as it is led by the enemy: indeed, I suppose that producing such a film now would satisfy their definition of 'propaganda.' So we'll have to make do with individual efforts from "X" instead. 

Any of you seen any good ones? The day is almost upon us. 

Never Change, OK

Oklahoma having a good day. 

The State of Virginia

Today was the day that unconstitutional gun ban was supposed to go into effect in Virginia, except it was slapped with a statewide injunction after a court found that it was likely to be proven unconstitutional in the lawsuit already filed. 

Separately, the DOJ has filed suit against Virginia today over these laws.

Also, SCOTUS just announced they will hear two relevant cases about banning AR-15s in October. 

Oh. Oh, No.

In a year in which socialist candidates are doing so well, competition for Bad Idea of the Year is fierce! However, we might have a winner already by about the halfway point.

Well, one often learns by making mistakes. Or, you know, someone else may learn from observing the experience.

By the way, the flaw in the plan isn't just the guns. It's the 'crash their system' idea. You are talking about people who are very comfortable operating without a system. When Hurricane Helene came through here, it absolutely crashed the system. Every system. The phones were out, the radios were out, the roads were all cut by fallen trees and washed-away bridges. Nobody waited for 'the system' to get fixed and start making things better. By noon I had a chainsaw militia clearing roads made up of every able-bodied man on the mountain and his chainsaw. Even once we began linking up the volunteer fire department and rescue technicians, guys with tractors were clearing roads the county wouldn't get to for days and the state wouldn't ever. 

FEMA? Never heard of her. 

Soco Gap

On Saturday, I rode across Soco Gap between Haywood and Jackson Counties to head down into the Cherokee Boundary Lands. I wanted to visit the casino because it has a Gordon Ramsay "Street Food" court, and I wanted to see what the famous chef's take on street tacos was like. (Spoiler: Gordon Ramsay doesn't know anything about street tacos.)  We got good and soaked, the several of us bikers headed that way, during a wave of cold and driving rain that came across just then. 

Since I was doing 'little known facts of local history' on the main post, here's another one:

In Cherokee, the pass is known as Ahalunun'yi (ᎠᎭᎷᏄn'Ᏹ), meaning "Ambush Place" or Uni'halu'na (ᎤᏂ'ᎭᎷ'Ꮎ), meaning "where they ambushed;" named after the occasion, probably in the mid-18th century, when the Cherokees ambushed a party of invading Shawnees, all of which were killed except for one, who was sent back (without his ears) to tell his people of the Cherokee victory.

I admire the directness of the Cherokee naming convention. My guess is that there were many more ambushes at that gap. It's the natural 'head them off at the pass' location between Maggie Valley and the main homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. It's not far from Big Witch mountain, which is just a bit to the west along the Blue Ridge Parkway. There are many witches in Cherokee mythology; I don't know which one that title means to connote. 

A Theory of Play

I saw this post on "X" and wondered if it was being tremendously unfair, so I went to see what else I could find about it. It sounds like it might be pretty fair in spite of the tone; the commentator on the other side seems to agree about the basic facts.

I looked into it and was surprised to learn that Lego launched the Friends line after years of market research. In 2008, they found that 90% of Lego sets were being sold for boys, despite the fact that they’ve had pretty gender neutral advertising over the decades. That means if they could find a way to reach out specifically to girls, they could practically double their sales. They studied how girls and boys built and played with castle Legos, and they found that boys built the castle and then enacted battles in front of it — the castle was just the backdrop. The girls built the castle and then were disappointed that there wasn’t anything going on inside of it where they wanted to enact their stories. They also learned that the girls were more interested in smaller projects, and that they were more likely to want to see themselves in the minifigs. And thus “Friends” was born, with hearts and butterflies and pink and purple colors and listed on the Lego website under the category of “girls.”

The second set of comments, which is the one I quoted, is from a site dedicated to science and skepticism from a feminist perspective. She still has some objections to the idea of gendered sales of "girls" toys and "boys" toys, and wants boys to be more comfortable trying out pink and purple and flowers. I kind of think we have probably chased that particular rabbit as far as it'll run, and the question now is what we do instead. 

But I'm no longer in the toy-buying market, and won't be again until and unless I get some grandchildren.  

Othering English

I was listening to someone talking about "othering" this morning, and I realized that part of the reason to avoid jargon is to avoid the baked-in weights it brings. A more usual reason is that you can't speak to anyone outside of your niche if you are captured by the jargon and can no longer express your thoughts without it. That will limit your ability to persuade anyone who isn't already part of your esoteric area of thought. Speaking plain English lets you speak with everyone who understands English.

Yet when you start trying to express what 'othering' might mean in plain English, you discover quickly that right away you lose the judgment that it is necessarily bad. In fact, even as a philosophical concept it isn't bad: it only became assumed to be bad when Critical Theory built out an argument that was adopted into theories of racism and colonialism. More basically, the idea of recognizing that some things aren't you is a necessary part of figuring out what is you, and thus what is yours. Recognizing that some things aren't yours is a necessary part of admitting to some limits on yourself: mind your own business means discerning what is, and is not, your business. Accepting limits on your own grasping will is an ethical value of the first rank.

To say that this is a process of discernment means also that it is a process of refinement. I am now figuring out what I like, and what I don't like. If we were talking not about racism but about, say, wine or fine coffee, we would in fact praise this sort of mindful experience, reflection, and then refinement of our tastes. Kant's Third Critique turns on how to do this well in what he thought was a universal and humane manner. 

That doesn't mean that racism is good, of course. It just means that you now have to explain how this process of recognizing your own limits, of discerning and refining your tastes, can go wrong as well as go right. That's a much more interesting and useful discussion to have; and if you can have it in plain English, you can have it with a much wider audience. 

Intellectual Diversity and Political Tolerance

You can't beat a deal like that.

Biker rallies are intellectually diverse. This one place is selling F*CK TRUMP patches right next to F*CK YOU TRUMP HATERS patches. There is widespread tolerance for varying political opinions, which is probably not what is generally assumed about biker rallies.

You can also buy brass knuckles. Other people's political opinions are generally less threatening when you have a good pair of brass knuckles. 

We're all going to get soaked together anyway.

It’s a racially diverse crowd too. Lots of black bikers up from Atlanta to enjoy the Smokies. The first one I saw was by himself and looked nervous about the Confederate flags*, but I made sure to welcome him so he'd know he was OK. He clearly felt better and, in short order, would have found that he was in no ways alone. We're all Americans up here. 

Usually the Redrum MC comes out, and they’re a Native American/First Nations led motorcycle club (not exclusive; white people can join, but they’re about honoring Native Americans). 

Theoretically this is Outlaws MC territory, but everyone is welcome. I see Outlaws and Pagans and a Hells Angels support club here. It’s just a good time for everyone.

We did get soaked, though.

All together a unifying and memorable experience. 

That one bike with her head turned is especially pretty.

I really appreciate motorcycle culture. People have their heads on right.** The political moment passes; every election is 'the most important of our lifetime.' But in the end, you pick your patch or no patch, sew it on or don't, and we all go ride the eternal mountains together. When all the dry land was one continent, these mountains were still here -- these Appalachians linked to the Grampians in what is now Scotland. They're old, and we're passing. We commune with them and are one with them. 

That's what matters. 

* Locally you see a lot of Confederate flags. This is because the Confederacy won the war here. At the end of the war, Thomas' Legion of Indians and Highlanders compelled the surrender of the last Union forces in the region. The Cherokee Nation declared war on the Union and allied with the Confederacy, for the obvious reason that the Union had been waging war on them since at least President Andrew Jackson, and for the less-obvious reason that they also were a slave-owning power. They joined with Scottish and Scots-Irish Highlanders to form a combined arms force that fought through the entire war. Together, they defeated the Union forces and obtained an agreement to surrender in the local town of Waynesville, North Carolina. As it happened, news of Lee's surrender to Grant arrived at about that same time, so they still held the surrender but reversed the polarity about which side was surrendering. However, the mountain folk were not only never defeated, they won. They remember that they won. The Cherokee often fly the Confederate flag too for the same historical reasons as the Highlanders. 

** Funniest thing that happened today: as I was going to the head, a lady biker with a beer in her hand took one look at me and squared up her shoulders. "Wanna fight?" she demanded. I smiled and answered, "Shore." She put her beer aside, raised her fists, and said, "Let's go!" Then she laughed, tapped my shoulder, picked up her beer and went on about her business. 

Firewood

Conan enjoys this much more than I do.

I usually start in February, and it takes until summer starts to finish. Cut a fallen tree here and there, split it and stack it, a bit at a time as I have time to spend on it. Now it can season all the long summer and autumn, and be fully dry by the time the cold arrives. 

Cash on the Barrelhead

Kind of a catchy song from 1950s honky-tonk. By coincidence I was talking with my wife yesterday on a walk about how she, her first time away from home in the 1980s, had no ability to call long-distance to reach home. My father having been a professional telephone man (and volunteer fire-fighter), I explained that all she had to do was go to any payphone -- remember payphones? -- and press "0," then explain what she wanted to a helpful operator. No one had ever explained that to her, so she was just unable to use the phone service when away from home for her several years at college. 

Not much help now, that explanation! In those days, we employed banks of operators full-time whose job it was to help you navigate that problem. Now a long-distance call isn't even expensive on most phone plans. Overseas ones still can be. 

“Confessions” of a Priest

In the following article, a basic conflict over the idea of natural law is spelled out by one Catholic priest who is competing with others -- including the infrastructure surrounding several Popes. He has support from another priest here. The more important priest, the one who wanted to essentially dispose of the old ideas about Natural Law, is interviewed here in Italian (but translators are easy to find these days).

In an interview... Bishop Vincenzo Paglia claimed a decisive role in the dissolution of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and its replacement by a new academic entity, as well as in the radical transformation of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He also made clear that these interventions were intended to bring about a profound paradigm shift, which—for the first time—he explicitly acknowledged as affecting not only the pastoral sphere but the doctrinal one as well.

According to Paglia, this “very profound” reform entailed, above all, a rethinking of the very concept of natural law. Paglia accused the John Paul II Institute of advancing a conception of natural law understood as a set of immutable principles from which moral norms are deduced. He proposed, instead, that natural law must be grounded in an ongoing historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience. In this perspective, a “theology within history and within people’s lives” must replace what he characterized as the late Institute’s “armchair theology.”

The short quote should suffice to show that this is not a debate limited to the Catholic Church. It is the cultural debate of the last several generations in the West. 

Always a Step Ahead

Wretchard, I mean. 

He usually is.

He points out that this means that the Chinese Communist Party is actually opposed to all the diversity initiatives it has spent so much time and money fostering in the West. So too, of course, the environmentalism; the opposition to data centers to power American AI; the opposition to militarism; to nuclear power.... 

Old Soviet trick, that last one. They just picked it up, but they generalized the lesson. The same part of the West keeps falling for it over and over again. 

Only if the scales ever fall away from their eyes. We're going on three generations now without that happening. If anything the mania seems to be growing, fired by social media propaganda so popular and mind-bending.

A Final Note on Exemplary Justice

I wrote on this directly in 2015. My thesis at that time contradicts every other philosopher; it is ancient in form, but it disagrees with all the ancient philosophers and sides instead with the poets, Plato's favorite enemy.

I quote this section in order to point out that this has not been the opinion of the enlightened only recently. Socrates is brought up against it by Protagoras:

If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught. This is the notion of all who retaliate upon others either privately or publicly.

Rational punishment does not look to the past but to the future, Protagoras says. Indeed, since we cannot change the past, the only reason -- that is, the only kind of purpose to which rationality even might apply itself -- for punishment must be an eye toward the future. Deterrence is rational. Rehabilitation is rational. Mere retribution is bestial, so he argues.

I think that the opposite is true. It is the beast who is most likely to forgo retribution. They will act not to revenge past harms, but to avoid fresh ones. They might kill you if they think you are still dangerous and sense a momentary advantage. They might just as readily avoid you to keep from presenting you with a chance to hurt them again. They will not feel any duty of honor to avenge themselves, or their families, nor to repay you for the wrongs you have done.

Retribution is a higher, not a lower quality. This is orthodox, is it not? Vengeance is the divine quality, not a bestial one. Human beings are urged to mercy and kindness toward their enemies not because it is irrational or animal to punish past wrongs, but because they are not high enough to do it well and justly. Be patient, return kindness for cruelty, and you will heap hot coals on their heads.

How fitting, then, that it was a Vicar who provided the author cited at the top of this post with his reasons. But this is not a purely Judeo-Christian view. The Ancient Greeks thought this too, those of them who were poets instead of philosophers. They also thought that vengeance and retribution were divine. Hesiod even tells you her name.

Plato and Aristotle on Exemplary Justice

In the Laws, Plato has his three strangers turn their attention to the matter in Book IX. Plato recommends for theft a proportionate equality, by which he means you must restore what you stole, and exactly that much again over it (thus, twice what you stole). This is purely retribution, and as I noted in the commentary it wouldn't have much deterrent effect. 

Plato hopes deterrence won't much be needed, as the book had opened with: the Athenian stranger was embarrassed even to admit that so well-ordered and virtuous a people would require criminal punishments at all. The whole structure of the work of the Laws is to try to deter crime by structuring a society so well that virtue will be the inevitable result. In Book X, for example, he lays out the mythological structure that will keep the people aimed in the right direction without the need for punishments. The myth reinforces the law, and makes all sorts of lawbreaking a sort of blasphemy -- which was punishable by death. The example is in the myth, though, not the punishment: blasphemers were to be executed not to set the example but to punish their blasphemy. It was the myth that set the example.

It was curious to me at the time, and remains so, that the Athenian later proves very interested in military punishments in Book XII. Anyone who has been associated with the military understands that regular disciplinary actions are part of the life; and being so regularly necessary, capital punishment can't be the normal course of action. Thus, we can't view military punishments as a sort-of blasphemy requiring execution every time. In fact, military punishments in the model city are notably milder than the punishments recommended for civilians, which is an interesting feature of the Laws' model. That is not normally how military justice has worked, although I guess there are some exceptions -- everyone knows of the guy who was allowed to join the Marines instead of prison. (I did in fact know a guy like that growing up. He turned out great after the Marines.)

For Aristotle, justice divides between distributive and rectificatory. The latter is most like Plato's 'proportionate equality' in revenging theft in that it repays those who have suffered damage, and it does so on lines of arithmetical equality. Aristotle's version doesn't worry over the question of whether a good man or a bad one defrauded the other, or whether the fraud was an accident or by intention: what is owed is to make the defrauded one whole. 

Now this was the EN, not the Politics, so we aren't looking at crime as such; more like a divorce settlement, I mentioned in that commentary, where it matters which spouse was the adulterer and which one not; it doesn't really matter which one was the better person, or how justified or not the adultery might have been because of neglect or hard feelings, just which one broke the agreement. 

What isn't advocated for here, though, is either revenge or example-setting. It would be wrong to punish the adulterous husband (or wife) a whole lot more just to send a message to other spouses; what is just is to recognize the harm done in the specific case, and address that and only that.

Prime Conan

Having seen what Amazon Prime wanted to do with Tolkien, I don't know if I'm pleased to hear this or not. However, since I subscribe to Amazon Prime anyway for the free delivery (even way out here, well, almost -- the mailbox is half a mile away), I suppose I'll see what it looks like if it makes it the screen.

Exemplary Punishment

There is a standing philosophical debate about exemplary versus retributive punishments. The sentences handed down yesterday against the ANTIFA cell in Texas -- 100 years for shooting a gun aimed at the ground, thirty years for moving a box of literature connected to the attack -- are versions of exemplary punishment, i.e., punishments that are meant to 'make an example' to deter others. 

Exemplary punishments are favored by some philosophers as the only moral form of punishment, because they think that retributive punishments do not work. Retribution on the other hand has Biblical warrant, famously 'an eye for an eye,' etc., so especially Christian philosophers have often suggested that it is moral to punish someone only for their own crimes/sins, and not for those of someone else -- especially crimes (or sins) that haven't even been committed yet, and may never be at all!

My favorite philosophical theory on retributive punishment -- not because I advocate for it, but because I love retelling it to see people's faces -- is Kant's theory. Kant especially loved capital punishment, which he advocated for a very great many things. One of those things was rebellion against your sovereign, as he was very much a law-and-order kind of guy. In the Metaphysics of Morals, he talks about two Jacobites who come to trial for their rebellion -- which sufficed, for him; the details didn't matter beyond that they were rebels. (For those of you who want to look it up, this is in Ak. 6:334). 

Kant said that the judge ought to offer each of them the choice between death or lifelong slavery. He imagines that one chooses death and the other slavery. The one who chose death should receive his wish and be put to death, because he is "acquainted with something that he values more highly than life, namely honor, while the scoundrel considers it better to live in shame than not at all." The one who prefers slavery should be denied his will, because he has proven he is unworthy of the honor of having his will respected: he should also be put to death. 

Hegel was also a retributionist; he thought that treating a man as a man by punishing him only for his own actions was just, whereas punishing a man to deter others was like "raising a stick at a dog," i.e., treating the other men as if they were animals to be intimidated rather than men to be respected. The use of the first man as a mere instrument rather than as an individual worth respect offended both. 

Hobbes is mostly a retributionist, but he allows that a valid secondary choice is to correct others liable to the similar offense. 

Those are all Modern thinkers, in the philosophical sense of the term -- Hobbes is really Early Modern. Among the Ancients, the exemplary punishment is the usual standard. Plato advocates for it the Protagoras as the only valid reason for imposing punishment.

If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention...

Likewise in the Gorgias and the Laws, the latter of which we went through at length together once. The Stoic position is similar, advocated by Seneca in (De Ira 1.19). Aristotle's discussion in the EN, which we also went through together, spells out retributive punishment explicitly, but also allows for deterrence and for restorative punishment as alternative forms. 

Not that it has only ancient advocates; deterrence/examples live also in J.S. Mill's utilitarianism, Bentham's as well (Rationale of Punishment).

I'll do a follow-up post later, I think, examining what I said about the issue in my commentaries on the Laws and the EN. For now, I just want to raise the matter for our discussion. What do you think about it?

Follow-up to Prior

The last post was more than long enough, and attacked the basic problem of 'what is wrong with this coherent argument about fairness?'. However, the Clovis example reminds me of an interesting fact about the Beowulf.

Clovis asks his warriors for a gift of honor at the end of a successful fight. He does not simply lay claim to a share of the treasure that is not warranted by the equal law governing their unequal society: "I ask you, O most valiant warriors, not to refuse to me the vase in addition to my rightful part."

The one soldier who refused him obeyed their law about division of spoils, but also then refused the king a requested gift -- he denied him an asked-for honor, which is to say that he imposed a shame. It was this, I think, that Clovis was revenging with his later murder of that soldier in a shameful manner, imposing a shame on him in turn. The entry does not mention, however, if Clovis later paid a blood-price to the soldier's family, as is highly likely. Fairness and unfairness were not the only issues in that society; the honor requested and the shame of being publicly embarrassed had to be addressed as well.

In the Beowulf, which holds up the title character as the very model of honor, we get demonstrations of what contemporary societies thought ideal behavior looked like. Having come to help the Danes with Grendel (in order to repay a debt of honor to Hrothgar incurred by Beowulf's father, who had enlisted Hrothgar's aid to help settle a wergild dispute of his own), Beowulf defeats first Grendel and then, when it proves necessary, Grendel's more powerful and magical mother. In doing the latter, he discovers and wins a great treasure. 

What does he do with it? He gives it all to Hrothgar.

Beowulf spake, offspring of Ecgtheow:

“Lo! we blithely have brought thee, bairn of Healfdene,

Prince of the Scyldings, these presents from ocean

Which thine eye looketh on, for an emblem of glory.

Beowulf had come, after all, to help Hrothgar and settle his father's debt of honor. He keeps nothing for himself. Yet Hrothgar recognizes that this 'gift from the ocean' is too great on top of the fight Beowulf has borne, and creates a new debt of honor on him. He repays this by giving Beowulf presents of his own, rich ones; and later, when Beowulf would leave him to return home, parting gifts as well. Hrothgar declares that all the old feuds are forgotten, and the two peoples united in friendship by this mutual exchange which will bring further visits and exchanges and growth and prosperity.

Unferth, a thegn of Hrothgar's who had not been able to defeat the monsters, gives Beowulf his sword as a gift -- an honor that repays the shame Unferth likely felt at having been unable to do the deed himself. Beowulf's acceptance of this redeems Unferth's incapacity, and restores the honor he might otherwise have lost by not being part of the story of Grendel's defeat.

On the return home to his own king, Hygelac, Beowulf is met by the coast guard to whom he gives a sword as a gift; then, on arrival to the king, he gives the king all that Hrothgar had given him as gifts to his own king, thus eliminating any chance that Hygelac would see Beowulf's newfound wealth as a potential threat to their relative positions. But this is also not the end of the exchange, because Hygelac then gives Beowulf great gifts in return for the substantial honor that Beowulf has shown to him by this free-handedness with what he had won. These gifts include manors and establishments that will produce wealth, placing Beowulf higher in the structure of Geat power because he has proven he can be trusted to keep faith with his king. Indeed, after Hygelac's death and then the death of his son, Beowulf arises to the kingship himself. 

This mode of gift-giving looks unbounded and without economic logic to modern eyes: Beowulf was the one who had earned the 'presents of the ocean' through combat; why give it to Hrothgar, who had already received much by having the monsters killed? One present, perhaps, but all of it? Then too with Hygelac, who had perhaps contributed by allowing Beowulf to go on the trip rather than insisting he stay at home; but did he thereby deserve all of the spoils of the venture? In freely giving away everything and keeping nothing for himself multiple times, Beowulf places his fate in the hands of men who are the very sort of men that the author of the 'fairness' piece would suggest ought to be expected to take unfair advantage, being already in positions of social power and authority. It looks illogical and uneconomical.

Perhaps outside of a work of literature, the kings would have behaved more like Clovis than like Hrothgar or Hygelac. Yet in the poem, where the ethic is being spelled out purely and on its own terms, honor provides an answer to these problems of economic grasping. Each recognizes the honor being done him and repays it fairly -- fairly, not disproportionately to his own advantage according to a notion of 'fairness' that is derived from the system's own extant inequalities. At least in the poem, honor proves to have an economics and a logic of its own, one that leads to Beowulf reigning in peace and stability for many decades. His people love him; nations abroad respect him whether they love him or fear him.

And so there is peace, until the dragon comes.

Justice as Unfairness

AVI has posted an interesting challenge, an article that strikes me as making a coherent but wrong argument; yet saying just exactly why it is wrong is the interesting and challenging part. It also plays with examples with which I am well-familiar, such as the diyya, an Islamic form of the wergild/weregeld that I have written about many times because we used to help negotiate them in Iraq as a means of trying to bring peace in tribal disputes that were contributing to the insurgency. 

The basic thesis is stated here: 

Fairness does not come from external principles that exist in the universe and bind us. Fairness norms are human solutions. They are the rules for playing the game of life properly and agreeing on everyone’s due in society.

Fairness norms allow people to avoid having to haggle all the time in real life and to agree quickly on how to split rewards and costs in their interactions. But they can work in practice only if they are not too far from what people could actually claim using their raw bargaining power in a hard-fought bargaining process. Only norms that are broadly in line with actual differences in bargaining power will tend to last.

The immediate problem with that thesis is that it does itself do what it claims it cannot do: it defines fairness, i.e., as "playing the game of life properly and agreeing on everyone's due in society." If this is a universal truth across all of the various societies covered, then there is a philosophical universal at work; the fact that different societies have come up with different ways of agreeing about how to address that universal is actually evidence against the idea that "fairness does not come from external principles," i.e., external to the facts about a given society. If every society develops some idea of fairness in spite of their substantial differences, there probably is -- indeed almost certainly must be -- something external to the facts of any given society driving that project.

The second problem with the thesis arises from the examples. Since I started with the diyya, I'll begin this part with it too. He's arguing that fairness norms essentially ratify existing imbalances in social bargaining power, and points to the fact that in Iranian law (his example, but Islamic law generally) a woman's life is worth half the compensation of a man's. It is true that women have less bargaining power in Islamic societies and under Islamic law; a woman's testimony is also worth half of a man's. Yet the diyya is not the only such system historically, and the value of free women compared to free men has not always disfavored women even though presumably women always had less bargaining power in the era.

This effectively made killing a celibate priest as expensive as killing a nobleman, a useful incentive for communities tempted to settle disputes with the local clergy through violence.

Women of childbearing age occupied an unusual position. The Salic Law valued a free woman who had begun bearing children at 600 solidi, triple the price of a free man, reflecting the community’s loss of future population.

Note that those arguments about why the price was set where it was are assumptions of the modern author, and that they are in direct conflict. If the concern was with future population, a celibate priest would be worth less, not much more. Still: the priest in that society had a very high bargaining power, being able to draw on the authority of the Church as its representative locally in an era of great Church power. One who was powerful enough that he could retain his position even though he was known not to be celibate presumably had greater bargaining power, though, not less: if the author's thesis were correct, he should command more compensation, not less, but the facts say otherwise. And the valuing of a free woman at three times the rate of her husband is not likely a demonstration that she had three times the bargaining power in society! Yet it was the case. 

This points to the second problem, but I'll go through another one of his examples before stating it. He opens with an example of king Clovis killing a soldier after that soldier enforced the (actually perfectly equal in spite of differing social/bargaining positions) Frankish rule about distribution of captured war treasure. The conclusion the author draws is that this shows that the equal rule couldn't survive in an unequal society. The example is contingent, however; if the soldier had survived Clovis' attempt and killed the king in revenge, he might well have been rewarded by being elevated to the kingship himself by his fellows (the same ones who had, after all, accepted his rebuke of the king earlier). Then we would be reasoning from the example that the equality demonstrated by the rule was so persuasive, even in an unequal society, that violating it allowed you to rebuke kings or, in extreme cases, kill and replace them (which is, by the way, the story of how the fictional Conan the Cimmerian became king by his own hand -- a story from a much later time).

The author of the original piece is a behavioral economist, not a philosopher nor a historian. He is attempting a philosophical project from historical examples. The problem with doing that is that the two disciplines are diametrically opposed to one another: history is concerned with stating the particular facts that actually happened; philosophy is concerned with the universals (such as this notion of 'fairness,' which appears in at least some form from Aristotle's 'justice as fairness plus lawfulness' to Iranian diyya to Saxon wergild to American payments for wrongful death or dismemberment). The attempt to straddle that line with economics is closer to the historical project, but the historical facts are in a sense accidents that might have gone this way or a different one as far as we know. The universals are found where, regardless of which way the facts happened to go, we still find the same themes emerging. 

Fairness and its relationship to justice is one of those things. I think it is probably true that those who occupy powerful bargaining positions are able to use their bargaining power in part to get the people around them to ratify their unfair position. The fact that they always feel the need to do so, with tools like laws or by purchasing social praise from journalists, or from skalds or scops or poets, or by purchasing masses from priests or commissioning praise-plays from playwrights, shows not that fairness is defined by their power. It shows that they are universally keenly aware that the unfairness makes their position perilous, and are always in every society seeking to shore it up. 

So what is fair, regardless of the facts of society? That was a question asked by John Rawls in the last century in his famous 'Veil of Ignorance' thought experiment. It's not an experiment that can actually be performed successfully, only imagined as a way of thinking about the problem. If you could pull people from different societies, times, and places, and put them through this 'veil' so that they were temporarily unaware of the facts of their society, and ask them to devise fair rules for any society -- knowing that any society would have inequalities of these kinds, but not knowing where they would fall -- what kinds of rules would they devise? 

Rawls wrote a long book about the idea that 'justice JUST IS fairness,' but if you read it he ends up smuggling back in Aristotle's idea that you need laws to enforce people treating each other the way that virtuous people would do by free choice. Thus, after the whole long thing you end up all the way back at the beginning with Aristotle. But there's your universal: two thousand years of law and economics and philosophy, and we always end up in the same place.