"Feminism Is Trying To Update Chivalry"

Now that's a strange thing even to ponder. Let's talk about that.

Chivalry was of course much more than about how men were to treat women. It was a rigorous code for knights that dealt with their relationships with all sorts of different people. We tend to have a negative view of chivalric codes as patriarchal and archaic, for good reason. (They’re patriarchal and archaic.) But the focus on behavior under these codes were how a certain class of men were to treat everyone who was weaker. And that’s a problem that’s not going away.... They’re acknowledging that male and female sexuality actually does need to be respected for its differences and that the average man is stronger than the average female, and as a result of all this, we need men to behave better for our civil society to keep functioning.

Not everyone -- I was just telling Tex about the way the shepherd boy who followed Joan of Arc was treated, hamstrung and stitched in an oxhide and drowned. Men who were weaker might be treated gently if they had proven that they could do certain things, but not qua weaker. Just being weak got you nothing.

What is going on with chivalry is that there is a special virtue, a wonderful excellence of human capacity, in those men who could tame horses and ride them to war. They had to be brave to mount the horse. They had to be masters of themselves, because the horse is a prey animal who will spook at anything. They had to command and to lead the horse, but they had to be sensitive to its every least movement. Even a flicker of its skin, unconscious to the horse itself, carries meaning to an attentive rider.

To become the kind of man who could do these extraordinary things was to achieve almost the capstone of virtue. Aristotle gives the capstone virtue as magnanimity, 'being great-soul'd,' a step perhaps even beyond the horseman. Here is the one who is so fully good that he does not care if there is the slightest reward for his goodness. He does right in spite of the worst punishments, caring nothing for the consequences so long as he follows the dictates of honor. The best knight attains this too, but if he is to be a knight at all he must attain the virtue of chivalry. He must be able to sit a horse, however many times he has been thrown, and lead it into the smell of blood.

The reason for a man to do this is that this is what it means to flourish as a man. You can take a horse, twelve hundred pounds, lay your hand on him, and ride. The horse is stronger, bigger than you -- yet also weaker, less in understanding. You can develop a relationship with him such that control follows your least signal. In testing yourself against this mighty thing, you will become great. No one will trouble you. They will stand aside, unless they are one of the great themselves.

'I am with you at present,' said Gandalf, 'but soon I shall not be.... Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.'

What is there to fear? Death? Not at all. Death has been faced many times, at least every time you lept in the saddle! So many times that Death is a comforting companion -- the road would not be quite right without him. Dishonor? Not while Death is your companion! Blood washes away dishonor, and he has trained himself to be such as to choose the blood over the dishonor every time.

Nothing here is archaic. The saddle and the man are there in the morning. They are the same as they have been, now and forever. If he lives this way, this man, he is doing it for reasons of his own that are fully satisfying. If it produces the kind of man you want -- and it is the kind you want, because how could you wish to claim 'equality' for yourself with any lesser man, the kind who steps aside from him with downcast eyes? -- that is a happy accident. He will treat you well, as long as he lives, because he is the right kind of man.

You have a society that produces few enough of these men, but not none. Look to that, if you want my advice.

Haka

I'd watch more sports if they were like this.  This is way better than a end-zone dance.



But they still lost.

Seeking a Black Knight

The Greater Depression

The economist formerly known as Brad DeLong argues that the only way to read the economic indicators is as preparing for a triple-dip. When, he asks, will we stop pretending this is not a depression?

The cynical answer is that "we," meaning the press who act as gatekeepers on the proper terms, will start calling it a Depression about two weeks after there is a Republican who can be held responsible for the condition of the economy. Looks like recovery summers until at least 2017!

The even-more-cynical answer is that neither journalists nor the administration's savants actually understand why the economy doesn't recover. All those "unexpectedly" comments by the press about bad economic news -- now a long-running joke -- are genuine. They honestly don't see that the economy has been so bad for so long just because of what they are doing to try to improve it.

Alaskans Trained as "Stay-Behind" Agents

I ran into this fascinating story today...that documents released under FOIA indicated that the U.S. was once worried about a Soviet takeover of Alaska, and planned to prepare "sleeper" agents to send out information in case this ever happened.

According to the story, the plans included caches of supplies for these agents to use...caches that were never needed. It brings to mind my favorite story about the Alaska Scouts of WWII. A man who became one of their officers had been dropped on a remote island with a shack full of C rations to spy on Japanese planes. He didn't see any, so he maintained radio silence, and the Scouts went out to "rescue" him when his C rations should've run out. According to a taped interview he gave (which I saw at the Anchorage Museum a few years ago), he cheerfully showed them the shack full of C rations, which he'd never even opened. Between his rifle, his fishing gear, and his crab traps, he was quite happy the way it was.

I checked the original file at "Government Attic" -- too long for me to read all the way through -- and ran across a description of a likely recruit:

An example of a typical person to be one of the principals, as suggested by OSI, is a professional photographer in Anchorage; he has only one arm and it is felt that he would not benefit the eney in any labor battalion; he is an amateur radio operator; he is a professional photographer; he is licensed as a hunting or fishing guide, and well versed in the art of survival; he is a pilot of small aircraft; he is reasonably intelligent, particularly crafty, and possessed of sufficient physical courage as is indicated by his offer to guide a party which was to have hunted Kodiak bear armed only with bow and arrow...

It's been a few years since I lived in that happy country, but I can believe they had plenty of recruits like this. My favorite quote from the story, though, is from one of the comments:

Well, back in the 70's the commander of the Alaskan National Guard was asked how long one of his Inuit Scouts could stay out on patrol. The Commander simply answered, "Until he dies of old age."

Kijé

A favorite piece of music.  We had this at our wedding, with two flutes and a guitar approximating the bit that begins at 10:00.  I particularly like the part beginning at 19:00 as well.



The suite's five movements, which were written to accompany a 1934 Soviet film of the same name, follow the career of a fictional lieutenant in the Russian army. A clerk to the Tsar creates the lieutenant by miscopying two words. The new "officer" catches the attention of the Tsar, who begins to write out orders for him, which no one dares refuse. The lieutenant falls in love, marries, and finally ceases to be a problem when the palace administrators announce his death and burial.

I guess I always thought Prokofiev was earlier than he really was.  He was born in 1891.  Like many great composers, he was a child prodigy who began producing operas and symphonies as a pre-teen; this was before World War I.  After the Revolution, he spent time in the United States and Europe, but began rebuilding ties with the Soviet Union in the early 30s, when he composed Lieutenant Kijé, and resettled in Moscow in 1936.  Eventually, of course, he began to experience blowback from the maniacs in charge, but he never got into serious trouble.  He died in 1953, at about the same time as Stalin.

Side B

H/t Powerline.

LOTR's that might have been

Via Ace at Buzzfeed.  I don't know that I'd have enjoyed Nicholas Cage as Aragorn, but Daniel Day-Lewis would have been awesome.  Sean Connery was offered 15% of box-office receipts to play Gandalf, which would have been $400 million.  Paul McCartney wanted to play Frodo in a production by Stanley Kubrick, and that one punches all my buttons.

Good times

David Foster refers us to a Ricochet post asking for suggestions about the happiest times in history.  Claire Berlinski proposes the following:

1. Rome under the Antonines, from roughly 160 AD to 220 AD.
2. Baghdad under the Caliphate, from roughly 800 to 1000 AD.
3. Western Europe under the peace of Innocent III, from roughly 1200 to 1300.
4. France during the Belle Époque, from say 1880 to 1914.
5. Vienna under the Emperor Franz Joseph, from 1865 to 1914.
6. The United States under Dwight Eisenhower, from 1952 until 1963.

Several commenters proposed adding Victorian Britain to Belle Époque France; Vienna of that period is already included, and the U.S. was a fairly contented place then as well, just before we all got together and tore the world up.  One commenter proposed Solomon's reign.  Another suggested 14th-century Mali.

This Is The School I Want For Our Kids

This sounds amazing.

History — Grade 9:

Aristotle, Politics.
Herodotus, Histories.
The Holy Bible, American Standard Version
Livy, Stories of Rome.
Plato, The Republic, et al.
Tacitus, Annals.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

English — Grade 9:

Cicero, Selected Works.
The Holy Bible, American Standard Version.
Homer, The Iliad.
Homer, The Odyssey.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.
Sophocles, Three Theban Plays.
Golding, Lord of the Flies.

The 10th grade list looks good, too. The 9th grade list is focused on the classical world (Golding is a strange bird to fold in there, since his work is clearly Freudian; it's not at all certain to me that he belongs, but otherwise the list is great). The 10th grade list focuses on the European heritage. Eleventh grade literature is wasted on American authors, only two of whom are truly great -- I mean of course Twain and Melville, and they intend to read only Twain -- and while there are a few other American books worth reading (To Kill A Mockingbird, say), the truth is that we don't merit a whole year. They could easily have extended the British literature segment to a year and a half.

I like reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar about the same time as Livy and Tacitus. Lots of cross-pollination to be had there.

Significance

This might be a good test to perform on all squishy research:  replace the numerical results with random numbers and see if the conclusions change.

On a lighter note

It's Saturday, and that means it's Quiz Time.  I got five of these "famous first lines of novels expressed in emoticons."

Chopped liver

President Obama has just observed casually that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.  It is a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, however, along with the United States:

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances is a political agreement signed in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994, providing security assurances by its signatories relating to Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.

The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine as well as those of Belarus and Kazakhstan. As a result Ukraine gave up the world's third largest nuclear weapons stockpile between 1994 and 1996, of which Ukraine had physical though not operational control. The use of the weapons was dependent on Russian controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system.

Following the 2014 Crimean crisis, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., as well as the other countries all separately stated that Russian involvement is in breach of its obligations to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum, and in clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia, however, argued that the Budapest memorandum does not apply to the 2014 Crimean crisis because separation of Crimea was driven by an internal political and social-economic crisis. Russia initially claimed it was never under obligation to force any part of Ukraine's civilian population to stay in Ukraine against its will.

To answer Grim's question, should the people of Ukraine worry?  If they were depending on their government's agreements with the U.S., the answer is yes.  And why anyone would ever again give up nuclear weapons (or anything else) in exchange for assurances from us is a mystery to me.

Should Ukrainians?

Over and over again — throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels — I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

Russia doesn't have the population, now, for a war like 1939. No European state does.

Of course, nuclear Russia doesn't have to invade you to make life difficult.

"It's best not to mess with us" is apparently the new Russian national motto, roughly equivalent to the old Scottish national motto: Nemo Me Impune Lacessit. The Scots meant it, back in those days. Perhaps they will again: they have a referendum on independence soon.

The Russians seem to mean it now. What to do?

Getting away

The Weather Channel isn't providing me with the radar pictures I was hoping for:  a series of lovely, wet thunderstorms that were supposed to be generated by this collapsing tropical system in the western Gulf.  But it does have a link to some amazing remote spots.

This one is a romantic monastic spot in Georgia.  No, not that one:  the one in Eurasia.

All Right, Market Defenders

Explain this one to me.

When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

He added: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell. The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."

Now, what I'd expect to see if there are more dollars chasing the same amount of food is a price spike, followed by a production spike. If there aren't actual needs for the food, though, that production spike should be followed by a price collapse. Thus, though people might starve to death in the short term, any who survived would eventually enjoy lower prices for food (at least until the market adjusted).

That isn't happening, apparently. What's happening instead is that food prices went way up in 2008, and have remained up (with occasional further spikes-and-collapses).

Is this a case for government regulation of the market, e.g., to prevent speculation on certain necessities like basic foodstuffs? Or is there an upside that isn't evident from the article? Or is there no upside, but regulation should still be opposed -- and if that, why?

Point of Parliamentary Procedure

Can one, in fact, become a "citizen" of the Caliphate?

"I formally and humbly request to be made a citizen of the Islamic State,”Hasan says in the handwritten document addressed to “Ameer, Mujahid Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

"It would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier to a people and its leader who don't compromise the religion of All-Mighty Allah to get along with the disbelievers."

Or is the proper petition to become a subject?

Decisiveness - a Remembrance

I remember how people used to make fun of President Reagan because he slept so much. The Capitol Steps did a really hilarious skit (to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"), where Reagan is sleeping through a foreign-policy crisis while Vice-President Bush tries to solve it alone and the chorus sings, "a-wake-him-up-a-wake-him-up-a-wake-him-up-a-wake-him-up..."

It was only years later that I learned, when Grenada was overthrown by a radical Marxist coup, Mr. Reagan was shaken awake at four in the morning...and he was ready to make his decision right then. No doubt it helped that he had a strategic vision. A simple one, they say, but effective.

ISIS has been on the rampage out of Syria and into Iraq since mid-June. Today, at the end of August, I heard the news from President Obama: "We don't have a strategy yet."

Our prospective next President got her longed-for 3 A.M. call from Benghazi...and blew it.

As the troubadours sang, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Fermi

Where is everybody? Well, if you were looking at our solar system from outside, the way we look at others, the only planet you'd see is Neptune:

More Voices on Chivalry

Another blogger takes up the question. He begins with two cases in which chivalrous actions ended up badly for the actors.

Even more tragic is the instance one night last July when a 49-year-old man came to the rescue of a woman being sexually assaulted by two men at a Fresno gas station. This allowed the woman to escape, but he was badly beaten by the pair and left in the street, where he was struck and killed by a passing vehicle.

That's true, but he died a hero. He could have passed by that scene and lived a coward. He could have lived long enough to die horribly of some disease of corruption. If you don't want to die a hero, how do you want to die?

The comment include the usual expressions, so well familiar as to be unremarkable. One, though, caught my eye. He was responding to a man who had declared that few women were 'worth' the risk, or the sacrifice.

Shame on you.

Chivalry has never been a 2-way street and your rationalizing is either an excuse for your own cowardice, or an irrational grudge against women. Every woman is worth it. Christ died for her, you and me, so we’re all worth it.

I have held doors and been insulted, given up a seat on a bus and been chewed out. I still hold doors and give up my seat. I won’t let such nonsense keep me down. I’ve stepped between a stranger and the man verbally abusing her. He looked like he could take me, but he didn’t try. A man’s duty is to protect and honor women, protect and guide children. There are no conditions attached. God bless those poor souls who did their duty. God have mercy on you if you go to Him with such excuses for your failings in life.

There speaks the soul of a Christian knight.