The Choices We Make

Good point.

I really don't understand how this happened, but I want somebody's backside in a sling.

Unfortunately that's unlikely to happen, because the people in charge don't understand military history or tradition well enough to know why this was wrong.

Maybe They Don't Always Even Need Guns

Citizens' militia, north Dallas.

Maybe It's Because American Girls Carry Guns

A Saudi historian explains why women can't drive.



You'll probably want to check out early, but you really should stay to hear his solution to the danger of them being raped by their chauffeurs. Also, to see the program's hostess unable to respond from laughter.

Terrible Things Done in the Name of Anti-Christ

Hicks described himself as an “anti-theist,” is aggressively opposed to religiosity of all kinds and may have taken his hatred out on these three slain students.

Poor kids. There are bad people in the world, and you've got to expect to meet them from time to time. It's best to prepare for it, because you can't always avoid them -- not even in a very nice place like Chapel Hill.

Organizing the Resistance

Eric Blair has said for years that citizen movements to reign in the Federal government weren't the real marker to watch for: the marker was state governments actively resisting the Federal government.

State legislators around the country have introduced more than 200 bills aiming to nullify regulations and laws coming out of Washington, D.C., as they look to rein in the federal government....

The 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights reserves to the states powers not granted to the federal government by the Constitution. States have long used it as a tool to protect themselves against regulations.

...

In Virginia, conservatives are pushing for states to invoke Article 5 of the Constitution and hold a “convention of states” to restrict the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.

The group Citizens for Self-Government is leading the charge, and three states — Alaska, Georgia and Florida — have already passed resolutions calling for the convention.... At the convention, Meckler said the states would work to pass amendments that impose fiscal restraints, regulatory restrictions and term limits on federal officials, including members of the Supreme Court.

“We’ll have [Article 5] applications pending in 41 states within the next few weeks,” he said. “The goal is to hold a convention in 2016.”

The Crusades as Belated Response

Austin Bay writes:

[For Islamic radicals hearing President Obama] "The Crusades" are a premier victim frame tale. Their cultural and religious victimization begins in 1096 (1st Crusade) as rapine European knights attack the Levant. In 1099 these thugs seize Jerusalem from peaceful Muslims. The 2nd through 9th Crusades are follow-on imperial atrocities. By the way, Israelis are just Jewish Crusaders.

Obama reinforced this crabbed and distorted but politically powerful claptrap. That's Very Stupid Diplomacy...

This victim tale starts with Yarmuk. The Yarmuk River flows east from Syria through Jordan to the Jordan River. In 636 A.D., somewhere near the river, Muslim Arabs defeated a Christian Byzantine army. Thirty years of conflict with the Persians had exhausted the boys from Constantinople. Their tattered formations were no match for horse-mounted zealots. One of Christendom's wealthiest regions, the Levant, fell to these Arab Muslim warriors. Then they turned on the exhausted Persians.

A counter-narrative: The Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista are belated European responses to Islamic imperialism. Yes, that's shaky. But if you know Muslim Saracens seized Sicily in the ninth century, and Rome was repeatedly attacked (and the Vatican sacked), you can start building a real multiculturalist case for embittered Western European grievance. Je suis Charlie? Naw, je suis Charles Martel (Battle of Tours, 732 A.D.).

It's not actually a shaky story at all, although I wouldn't call it a "victim tale." Pope Urban's call for the first Crusade was influenced by two things, both of them immediately contemporary to him:

1) A request from Constantinople for support against Islamic raids, which had not stopped in 636 but rather had continued for hundreds of years,

2) Successes by Western knights in reversing and recovering territory in Spain that had long been overrun by the Islamic Caliphate.

It is surely unsurprising to learn that it wasn't ancient grievances but immediate events that were motivating him. Don't take my word for it, though: take William of Tyre's. He wrote his history within a century of the liberation of Jerusalem, and had access to the primary sources written by the Crusaders themselves.

The Ship of Ely Fen

A beautiful virtual tour of Ely Cathedral.

The fires of the Great Army
That was made of iron men,
Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn
Ran around England red as morn,
Fires over Glastonbury Thorn—
Fires out on Ely Fen.

...

The Earls of the Great Army
That no men born could tire,
Whose flames anear him or aloof
Took hold of towers or walls of proof,
Fire over Glastonbury roof
And out on Ely, fire.

Chesterton would have looked on it, and doubtless thought of it while composing those lines, but Alfred would not have. This particular cathedral was built by Norman kings some years after Alfred broke the great army that no man yet had tired.

"Baby-Making"

The author, it turns out, has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell.

You think it’s exciting to play with blindfolds and cute little commercial handcuffs? Please. Try volunteering for a real adventure: the maternity ward, and everything that comes after. How can such momentous changes unfold from something as deceptively simple as sex? That, my friends, is mystery and intrigue.

The safety part? Well, that’s obvious, too. There’s nothing quite like getting cozy with a man, fully believing that 1) through this encounter, a completely new person might come to be, and 2) if that happens, he’s in all the way.

I'm guessing Cornell must be a pretty good school. She's thought this through, has a solid argument, and is willing to speak some blunt and highly unpopular truths -- follow her links.

Roy Moore & Defiance

Slate is hopping mad about Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's new order directing probate court judges not to issue gay marriage licenses.

In a stunning display of defiance against the judiciary, the U.S. Constitution, and the fundamental rule of law, on Sunday night Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore forbade probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Moore’s interdiction explicitly flouts a federal court order requiring the state to begin recognizing same-sex marriages on Monday, a decision the Supreme Court declined to put on hold.

I don't think it's fair to characterize this as defying a Federal order. What he said was that the Federal order explicitly limits itself to only the Attorney General and his agents, a class that doesn't include probate court judges (who not only don't work for the Atty General, but are of an independent branch of the government). A Federal judge could issue a new order, but for now he's technically correct: Alabama's attorney general and his agents have to stop enforcing the law, but probate court judges are still bound by it.

Of course, if the attorney general can't prosecute you for breaking the law, what would stop a probate court judge who wanted to do so from issuing such licenses? Moore offers the opinion that the governor would have the responsibility, somehow:

...it would be the responsibility of the Chief Executive Officer of the State of Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley, in whom the Constitution vests "the supreme executive power of this state," ... to ensure the execution of the law."The Governor shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." ... 'If the governor's "supreme executive power" means anything, it means that when the governor makes a determination that the laws are not being faithfully executed, he can act using the legal means that are at his disposal.

OK, but what means are those? Can the governor personally prosecute you?

In addition, the very point Moore is standing on here -- the separation of the judicial and executive branches -- means that Roy Moore has no authority to order the governor to do anything. If the governor elects not to do whatever it is he decides he could do, there's nothing Roy Moore can do about it. If the governor is on his side this order provides cover for some sort of action. It's very unclear what action that would be. Alabama's judges are elected, so perhaps the governor could campaign against them next time 'round. But he could do that anyway, if he wanted to do it.

Identity Trumps All

A Western country does not belong in the Middle East and the inclination of the other peoples of the region to oppose such a state is instinctive.

Gay rights, women’s rights and Western-style democracy are also not going to do the trick as all three are irrelevant to the core issue at hand, and true indigenous status easily trumps all three in the minds of even the most progressive young activists.... It is also time to throw away the (somewhat arrogant and very much irrelevant to the point of discussion) “we are the good guys because we are more civilized/produce better technology/have more Nobel prizes than you” rhetoric and go back to the authentic definition of Zionism as an indigenous people’s liberation movement...

I find this argument amazing. Not, I should add, in a good way. It's pushing for a clean break with the argument that X is right in favor of a pure identity claim -- and one that allegedly trumps other identity claims, on a basis that is neither asserted nor obvious to me.

I understood what Yishai Fleischer meant when he said, 'Hey, here on the Mount of Olives are three thousand years of Jewish graves. We belong here.'

Having established that, however, you still have a duty to do right. At no point did he follow up 'we belong here' with 'and therefore we can do whatever we want to everyone else.' The Nobel prize may be a joke, but the ideal of striving for the good and for a kind of justice is not at all a joke.

Disney Princesses Go To War

Um, for ISIS?

Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants­ to­ ISIS

Carolyn Hoyle, Alexandra Bradford and Ross Frenett, January 2015

Launching our Women and Extremism (WAE) programme, this report focuses on those women that have travelled from the West to ISIS held territory in support of the terrorist organisation. The first in a series of reports, this research draws on our database of known female migrants to ISIS and analyses their reasons for joining the group, the threat they pose and how to stem the flow of women joining ISIS.

That seems like a questionable decision for even the least spunky Disney Princess.

News Flash

Texas, Georgia are not the most conservative states in the Union -- in fact, they barely make the top twenty.

Wow. I mean, Mississippi, Alabama, sure, but I've got to get out to Wyoming.

The Empire Strikes Back

Japanese troops build monumental snow sculpture.

Terrible Things Have Been Done

...in whose name, exactly?

More than the Spanish Inquisition, nine times as often as Bush. But he gets to be the preacher chiding the Christians to get off their high horse.

Be Still, My Heart

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages.

You're probably thinking of the President's Iraq policy allowing a 7th century quasi-government to seize control of much of the Levant, while playing along with Iran's nuclear ambitions in a way likely to secure the theocracy's position among the nations of the world, while making it ever more likely that we'll see a renewed war in the Holy Land.

What he's actually thinking about is the way private contractors remind him of 14th century mercenary armies. There's a strong argument for privatizing our response to groups like ISIS, though, which is that small private firms can offer a short decision chain similar to our enemy's. We don't lose the capacities provided by formal government armies, but those have Schumpeter's disadvantage in dealing with highly adaptable small forces. This is why Marx was wrong about capitalism leading inevitably to monopoly: small competitors lack the economies of scale, but they can often pick off pieces of the larger businesses because their ossified decision-making chains take too long to compete.

That works with 'monopoly on force,' too. As long as contractors are employed by legitimate governments and held accountable according to the ordinary laws of war, there's no reason they should not be used to deal with ISIS-type threats. It's my sense that it's actually much easier to hold private firms and their employees accountable using government mechanisms than for the government to hold itself and its own accountable. There's no sense of protecting one's own that would derail prosecutions, and it's very easy to cancel a contract.

Besides, the 14th century was the during good part of the Middle Ages.

Early blogging

The American experiment with liberty has been under fire since its creation.  The following is an excerpt from a curious little pre-Civil War publication called "Stephen H. Branch's Alligator." Mr. Branch announces that he has reluctantly concluded he must leave his homeland, in view of the alarming political developments. After a lot of fire and brimstone, he suddenly closes in a calmer mood:

Go on, then, ye fanatics and devils of all sections, to your hearts' content, in your apostacy to the living and departed patriots of your distracted and divided country. Stop not until your wives and children run wild through streets and fields of blood, and this whole land is a pile of bleeding and burning ruins. Go on ye incarnate fiends in your bloody enterprise, until the mounds of your fathers are divested of their fragrant verdure, and are trampled by foreign marauders, who wildly gloat over your impending suicide. An irresistible horde of demagogues and vampires, and fanatics and lunatics, are at the throats of the American patriots, and threaten them with strangulation and utter annihilation. Go on, then, ye demons of hell, and tear to fragments the glorious Constitution that was created by Washington, Greene, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Warren, Franklin, Adams, Lafayette and Kosciusko, and nobly defended by Jackson, Perry, Taylor, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Harrison, Grogan, Decatur, (and the living Scott), whose sighs and tears, and expiring energies, were consecrated to its eternal duration. Go on, then, ye slimy vultures, in your ruthless desecration of their graves, until despotic soldiers line our streets and frontiers, and stab the patriots who breathe the enchanting word of liberty. Go on, I say, in your inhuman sacrilege, but I will fly to Switzerland, in whose deep mountain glades I will strive to efface that I was born and reared among the gang of consummate fools and knaves who now level their rifles at the race of noble birds that have graced the American skies for nearly a hundred years. Go on, then, ye dastard traitors, in your bloody demolition, but I will go and live and die in the land of William Tell, whose fair posterity evince a purer fidelity to their remotest ancestors, than those pernicious monsters whose infernal madness will soon surrender the bones of Washington and Jackson to the despots of Europe, whose shafts they foiled, until they went down, with tottering footsteps, into their immortal graves. Farewell, then, ye crazy parricides--farewell, ye Burrs and Arnolds--and when you have consigned your deluded countrymen to all the horrors of anarchy and eternal despotism, think of the humble admonitions of one who, rather than behold the downfall of his beautiful and glorious country, sought peace, and succor, and a mausoleum in the mountains of Switzerland, once traversed by William Tell and his gallant archers, who created a love of liberty that has survived the flight of centuries, and which can never be subdued by foes without, nor fools within, her borders. In my voluntary exile, I will implore God to visit you with His displeasure, through the withering curses of your children, and their posterity to the remotest age, for destroying the liberties of their country, which you should bequeathe to them as they came to you from your illustrious fathers, whose sacred and silent ashes you dare not visit and contemplate at this fearful crisis, amid the pure and tranquil solitudes of the patriotic dead lest the memory of their heroic deeds and sacrifice should remind you of your hellish treason, and paralyze your hearts, and smite your worthless bodies to the dust, and consign your pallid livers to undying torture. Although these admonitions are inscribed in tones of burning scorn, yet they emanate from a bosom that glows with love for my bewildered countrymen. And my last request is, that every patriotic father will gather his little flock around him at evening shades, and read this parting admonition in a clear and feeling voice, and then kneel before the God of nations, and implore Him to preserve their liberties, with a blessing on the humble author of this production, in his unhappy seclusion in a distant land. I would write more, but gushing tears blind my vision, and swell my heart with dying emotions.

Affectionately, 

Stephen H. Branch. 

New York, May 30, 1856

Later, he offers this theory of his fiery nature:

And if, in the morning of life, we do not reflect Vesuvius in our eyes, and belch lava and brimstone from our mouths, we seldom effect much in the great scuffle of life, and go down to our graves with Miss Nancy inscribed at the head and tail of our grassy mounds.

Man, like a horse, must have mettle, and plenty of it, with an immense bottom, or he cannot expect to contend with the fiery steeds of the turf and the forum. And, above all, a man must have a crop or two of worms at 40. All men have more worms in their bellies than they are aware of, (or their physicians, either,) and some have quarts.

Friday Night: The Killer at the Star Club

Scary Christians

Nice one, Bobby:

"The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

What To Tell Sons About Women

So Cassandra and I seem to agree about something, which is that we as a culture need to do a better job teaching our sons about how to understand women. She wrote in a comment:

I wish we could find a way to teach our sons that women aren't lesser or even necessarily weaker. We are stronger in some ways, and undoubtedly weaker in others. But the "lens" here can't be, "compared to a man".

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could see being fully human as a spectrum, along which men tend to position here and women there, but in which - as we mature and grow - the area of overlap grows too?

I always thought that was the entire purpose of marriage: for men and women to teach each other how to be better rounded, more flexible, wiser?

Points on which I agree:

1) We should find a way to teach boys to think of women that doesn't convey that women are "lesser." That's very important, especially if we want boys to consider the woman's interests as something for which they should (at least occasionally) set their own interests aside.

2) There are senses of the words "stronger" and "weaker" in which it can be said that women are stronger than men.

3) The lens shouldn't be "compared to a man," but rather we should teach them to understand that there is an independent and valid perspective they should respect.

4) Part of the purpose of marriage is the unity of husband and wife, which is the only way to experience the fullness of human nature. That's one of St. Thomas Aquinas' three "ends" of marriage.

5) As men age, the natural decline in testosterone reduces one of the major factors that result in very different experiences of the world between men and women. Thus, it makes sense to speak of older men as being better able to understand women's perspective.

Points on which I don't agree:

1) "Being fully human as a spectrum" is only a wonderful thing to teach if it's true, and there are problems with the model. It seems like a lot of people think that way today, which is why you read journalists writing without irony about a man "transitioning to a woman" as if he were transitioning from one job to another. That can't be right, though: at the end of the process, what you will have is not a woman but a surgically altered male who is taking artificial hormones his body won't ever produce on its own. Whether this is in any sense a woman is a topic we've discussed at length, but it seems to me that the only available answers are that there is never a woman or there was always a woman. The idea of transitioning along a spectrum doesn't seem defensible.

2) The lens in a sense has to be "compared to a man" insofar as we are talking about how to raise sons. The very thing we need them to understand is that there's a contrast between the world they live in and the world a woman lives in -- and that requires talking about how their experience compares to hers. That's a problem, given that we agree in the goal in (3) above, but it's a problem we need to grapple with.

3) I think Aquinas is right that the understanding of human nature across the sex divide is not the "entire purpose" of marriage, but rather part of the purpose of marriage. I'm not sure this is a serious difference -- Cass may have been using "entire purpose" for emphasis, rather than being committed to the position literally.

4) As women age, they also endure significant changes in their hormone structures that alter their perspectives in all new ways that men don't experience and need to learn to understand by communication and intimacy. We don't grow closer by nature, in other words; one difference diminishes, a new one appears.

5) Even granting agreement on point (4), we can't rely on marriage to solve this problem because it will generally occur after the period in which misunderstandings are most dangerous. It may be the eventual and complete solution, but we still need an interim approach.

So, all that said --

What should you teach your sons about women?

Stay Classy, Gawker

Morons.