“If you get a chance — please tell HRC that she was a ROCK STAR yesterday. Everything about her 'performance' was what makes her unique, beloved, and destined for even more greatness. She sets a standard that lesser mortals can only dream of emulating.”
Hot Air has some thoughts from a top Vox editor on the righteousness of violence against Trump rallies.
Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot.
— Emmett Rensin (@emmettrensin) June 3, 2016
So …. who exactly is the fascist in this scenario? The Week’s Michael Dougherty seemed to wonder that himself, asking Rensin what exactly he saw as the limits of “legitimate” political violence. The answer? Murder’s out … but that’s about it:
@michaelbd Destroying property is legitimate. Shouting down is legitimate. Disruption of all events is legitimate. Murder isn't.
— Emmett Rensin (@emmettrensin) June 3, 2016
So any violence short of murder is legitimate, as long as the political aim is pure enough, presumably. If you’re wondering what kind of violence isn’t legitimate, Jeryl Bier found this line in Rensin’s sand from last year:
Here's @emmettrensin on "literal violence": https://t.co/gmYzGWfbHO pic.twitter.com/HPYejDklOm
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) June 3, 2016
A “Stop Hillary” wifi password is literal violence, while destruction of property and shutting down free speech is just legitimate political action.
So what's so wrong with just killing Trump? Wouldn't it obviate the need for all this destruction of property, all these clashes in the street? Doesn't everyone say that they'd kill Hitler if they could go back in time and do so?
I mean, I understand the Catholic objection -- that murder is an inherently disordered act. But surely you won't want to impose some religious test on your politics, Vox. Why not have the courage of your convictions?
UPDATE: Althouse: "Yells of "[F***] you!" are heard, along with vuvuzelas and chants of 'Trump go home!'"
Vuvuzelas, is it? Now we know what we're dealing with here.
UPDATE: Voxsuspends, but does not fire, its editor. Go sit in timeout until after the election -- everyone knows you don't actually tell people to riot. You just say that it's completely understandable that people riot given how awful Trump is, and that it's certain to get worse.
I don't know who Daredevil is, but I gather it's a superhero thing. Nevertheless, I was over at Brandwine Books to see what Lars Walker has been writing about recently, and he has a post that discusses the series. I found this point interesting:
When Kingpin calls Vanessa on the carpet for concealed carry, viewers learn that she’s not some ingénue, but rather an empowered woman with her own ambitions: “We’ve been sitting here talking for hours, and you’re going to insult me like I have no idea what you really do? … I know you’re a dangerous man. That’s why I brought a gun to a dinner date.”
Way back when we were first dating, it was a point in my future wife's favor for me that she carried a knife. Though she later admitted to me that she wasn't used to men who carried guns, she accepted it as a risk worth taking for me.
For me, it's kind of neat to see that sort of thing reflected in fiction.
LTG (R) Jerry Boykin was one of the greats in his day, and now seems to spend most of his time on issues of faith. So of course that's where they hit him:
A Kansas military base abruptly canceled an upcoming prayer breakfast that featured retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin after complaints were lodged that Boykin is anti-Muslim and anti-gay.
Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder Mikey Weinstein told Army Times that Boykin’s invitation had caused great angst among soldiers at Fort Riley – leading some to break down in tears.
“I have clients of ours weeping on the phone about this,” he said.
Weeping? Oh, please.
“I sincerely doubt that America can expect to win wars if the people who are tasked to do so are frightened by an old retired general with biblical views and a testimony of faith,” Boykin told me.
Boykin, an original member of Delta Force and an executive vice president of the Family Research Council, was scheduled to deliver remarks at a June 6th prayer breakfast. The event was set to be held in conjunction with the 1st Infantry Division’s Victory Week celebration....
“He sows hatred and heinous divisiveness with his sickening screed of fundamentalist Christian supremacy, primacy, exclusivity and triumphalism,” Weinstein wrote in a complaint to Fort Riley.
I don't share Boykin's views, but to find them "sickening" represents a pretty harsh opposition to his mode of faith -- in fact, at least as harsh a mode as the one Boykin aims at Islam, which is one of the MRFF's complaints against him.
Their response is several paragraphs long, but here is the nut: "We simply do not receive similar complaints involving any religion other than Christianity."
Aristotle said that justice lies in treating similar cases similarly. The big question there, as here, is what constitutes "similar."
Trump is the only one who even might prosecute top members of the Clinton machine. If Hillary Clinton is elected, it'll be open season for high-level corruption, the sale of American power to the highest bidder, and bribery on a scale never seen before in the United States.
I don't know if Trump would be good or bad for the rule of law. But I know he can hardly be worse. What's surprising to me is that the Times can't see how ridiculous it is to put forward the Clinton machine as Guardian of the Rule of Law.
I can see the slogan now: 'Vote Fox for Henhouse Sheriff!'
UPDATE: Related: "We’re all thinking the same thing but an RNC spokesman was the first to get to say it: Of the two major-party nominees this year, it ain’t Trump who mishandled classified information."
None of this stuff is of the tu quoque fallacy. It's not that Trump's opponents do it too. It's that the charge that he does it overlooks the fact that his opponent is far worse on all of these issues.
I've been sharply critical of Donald Trump's remarks on women throughout this election season, but this time I think the media may be misreading what he said. He's not suggesting that it's dangerous for a husband to have a wife who works. If I understand him he's suggesting that it's dangerous to employ one's own wife as a business subordinate.
Now we have all these rules about sexual harassment in the workplace just because we recognize that it's perilous to go the other way -- to seek a wife (or husband) from among one's business associates. The idea that it's dangerous to combine the two spheres of engagement is thus not a very strange thing to say at all, especially not from a feminist perspective: they've been driving most of these rules for just this reason.
So why should it be surprising to learn that it works the other way too? If the creation of intimacy can put undesirable stresses on a business relationship, why would it be surprising that bringing an intimate relationship into the workplace might put undesirable stresses upon the intimate relationship? It seems well-established that the two relationships are at cross-purposes in certain respects.
On the other hand, there are millions of stories of immigrant families who came to America and built a successful business around their family ties. Just over the hill is an Indian family who runs a small convenience store. The father, wife, and son all take turns staffing it, and the revenue is managed as family income. This program has worked to the good of generations of immigrants, helping them become established in what can be a difficult economy.
Still, it's not weird to think that the business and the intimate don't go together well. The American business environment is an ideally asexual, professional environment built on competition between atomic actors for position, responsibility, and salary. A marriage is an ideally sexual, intimate environment in which resources are pooled for the common good. It should be no surprise at all to learn that the two forms wear against each other. The conclusion that they might be better kept separate seems like wisdom to me.
“The last serious terrorist incident in the United States occurred in San Bernardino, Calif. Those people were converted over the internet,” Clinton said. “You can build all the walls you want. You can build them all across Canada; they got a bunch of foreigners in Canada. You could build a seawall in the Atlantic and a seawall in the Pacific. …. And then you could send the Navy to the Gulf of Mexico to block anybody else, and put all the planes in the Air Force up. You could not keep out the social media.”
Actually, the wife went to an Islamic school in Pakistan before returning to Saudi Arabia. She and her husband met online, and he was probably radicalized by her, but he also went to Saudi Arabia for a while -- that is probably where they received whatever training they had that allowed them to build destructive devices and execute the attack.
Not that social media and self-radicalization aren't a problem. Your example, however, was particularly poorly chosen.
Hatashiai! is the latest "we can make a realistic sword-fighting game" to seek crowd funding. I notice that in addition to six Japanese schools, they include "Chinese Sword" and "[Western] Long Sword" as options for players.
By the way, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is now in beta testing. It aims at a much wider kind of realism than just the sword-fighting, attempting to accurately recreate a moment in the Middle Ages as thoroughly as possible.
A possible loss in California has the Clinton machine in panic mode.
Bernie's victory, should he attain it, almost certainly won't propel him to the nomination. It might cause the death of the Clinton machine, however, as it is not clear that it could maintain its monetary racket without plausible access to the political influence it is selling. The scale of Clinton corruption is such that its death would be a major step forward in correcting American political corruption.
What comes next? Joe Biden, maybe. Maybe a free-for-all at the convention. Whatever it is, it would be better.
Via Wretchard, this week's tribulation over the gorilla has brought to everyone's attention the fact that zoos have some pretty serious ordinance right to hand.
The team armed themselves with four guns from a locked cabinet kept in the general curator’s office. Salisbury carried a 12-gauge shotgun. The remaining staff carried two .375 rifles and a 30.06 rifle.
That .375 is a beast. If it were used in a crime, the news media would describe either of those calibers as "a high-powered rifle" and/or "a sniper rifle" and/or "a rifle designed to penetrate police body armor." Well, it wasn't really designed to do that -- it was designed to penetrate heavy bone and fat deposits in order to reach the vitals of big game animals like buffalo. But it certainly would penetrate any body armor you want to name.
We hear increasingly confident claims from advocates of neuroscience that we shall soon understand how the brain works. How plausible are these claims? Someone thought of a test.
The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, underlies all of humanity’s scientific and artistic endeavours, and has been repeatedly described as the most complex object in the known universe. By contrast, the MOS 6502 microchip contains 3510 transistors, runs Space Invaders, and wouldn’t even be the most complex object in my pocket. We know very little about how the brain works, but we understand the chip completely.
So, Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording wondered, what would happen if they studied the chip in the style of neuroscientists? How would the approaches that are being used to study the complex squishy brain fare when used on a far simpler artificial processor? Could they re-discover everything we know about its transistors and logic gates, about how they process information and run simple video games? Forget attention, emotion, learning, memory, and creativity; using the techniques of neuroscience, could Jonas and Kording comprehend Donkey Kong?
No. They couldn’t. Not even close.
Now, that's interesting, but it depends on an analogy that is increasingly questionable. Here's an article that argues that your brain does not process information, and is nothing like a computer.
The recent Islamic committee ruling that Pakistani husbands could beat their wives "lightly" has produced a significant backlash.
I imagine the committee members are surprised. The committee was just reiterating a perfectly well-established shariah law principle. Pakistan, 'the land of the pure,' was established just so that people could live authentically Muslim lives. Why wouldn't women be on board with such an obvious ruling, well within the luminous tradition of their faith?
From the Blueberry website (from Gov. Perry's joke about Austin's being the blueberry in the tomato soup of Texas), a tale that punches my buttons from both sides. On the one hand, the 1890's home in Old West Austin is just the kind of building I love, and few things would make me happier than to have a few million dollars at my disposal to give it a loving restoration. On the other hand, it doesn't belong to me, and neither I nor its owners have that kind of cash available for the necessary work. What the owners have instead is a lot of neighbors who wish someone else would undertake the project so they could enjoy the fruits of it gratis.
I run into the same attitude here on my underdeveloped little semi-rural peninsula: none of us enjoys seeing undeveloped land turned into new housing. When someone else owns the undeveloped land, we experience it as a neighboring parkland, without the inconvenience of paying taxes on it or forgoing the income from selling it to a developer. Such a crime to destroy the parkland! And yet all of us live in houses that were built on previously undeveloped land. Most of my neighbors prefer to clear nearly all of their previously undeveloped land, even the parts that their houses don't sit directly. Somehow, in spite of this, they are up in arms when someone else nearby does the same. Yet it never occurs to them to pool their resources and buy the undeveloped land so they can lovingly preserve it as habitat. That's always for some other rich guy to do: the besetting policy sin of our age.
Do I wish more people were passionate about undeveloped habitat and 19th-century buildings? I sure do. I wish they cared enough about it to make it a financial priority in their own households, instead of only important enough to try to bully other people about.
But there was always a particular moment, midway through our first
lecture on the EU, when my American students would look particularly
dumbstruck.It was when they
learnt that the common market, entered into in a spirit of amity to
heal war-torn Europe, had by the reasoning of its appointed Judges,
determined that EU laws must reign supreme over those of the EU’s member
states.
...
In the present British debate, it is informative to recall the shock
that greets an outsiders’ first understanding of how the EU grew. Its
history is of an unstoppable escalation, either emanating from its own
internal logic and powers or by a concerted but quiet power grab.
Open borders with Turkey within a decade is the inevitable apotheosis of
a century in which we diluted our laws, pooled our sovereignty and
vowed to intermingle our land and laws with our neighbours and beyond.
Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. Of these thunderbolts, that had no earthly forging, were made, with suitable runes, such weapons as had to parry unearthly dangers....
To her he said that the day of his need was come. And she bade him gather thunderbolts in her garden, in the soft earth under her cabbages....
On the grass beside her he laid those strangers to Earth. From wonderful spaces they came to her magical garden, shaken by thunder from paths that we cannot tread; and though not in themselves containing magic were well adapted to carry what magic her runes could give. She laid the thigh-bone of a materialist down, and turned to those stormy wanderers. She arranged them in one straight row by the side of her fire. And over them then she toppled the burning logs and the embers, prodding them down with the ebon stick that is the sceptre of witches, until she had deeply covered those seventeen cousins of Earth that had visited us from their etherial home. She stepped back then from her fire and stretched out her hands, and suddenly blasted it with a frightful rune. The flames leaped up in amazement. And what had been but a lonely fire in the night, with no more mystery than pertains to all such fires, flared suddenly into a thing that wanderers feared.
As the green flames, stung by her runes, leaped up, and the heat of the fire grew intenser, she stepped backwards further and further, and merely uttered her runes a little louder the further she got from the fire. She bade Alveric pile on logs, dark logs of oak that lay there cumbering the heath; and at once, as he dropped them on, the heat licked them up; and the witch went on pronouncing her louder runes, and the flames danced wild and green; and down in the embers the seventeen, whose paths had once crossed Earth's when they wandered free, knew heat again as great as they had known, even on that desperate ride that had brought them here. And when Alveric could no longer come near the fire, and the witch was some yards from it shouting her runes, the magical flames burned all the ashes away and that portent that flared on the hill as suddenly ceased, leaving only a circle that sullenly glowed on the ground, like the evil pool that glares where thermite has burst. And flat in the glow, all liquid still, lay the sword.
The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer. And all the while the unearthly metal grew harder. The white liquid stiffened and turned red. The glow of the red dwindled. And as it cooled it narrowed: little particles came together, little crevices closed: and as they closed they seized the air about them, and with the air they caught the witch's rune, and gripped it and held it forever. And so it was it became a magical sword. And little magic there is in English woods, from the time of anemones to the falling of leaves, that was not in the sword. And little magic there is in southern downs, that only sheep roam over and quiet shepherds, that the sword had not too. And there was scent of thyme in it and sight of lilac, and the chorus of birds that sings before dawn in April, and the deep proud splendour of rhododendrons, and the litheness and laughter of streams, and miles and miles of may. And by the time the sword was black it was all enchanted with magic.
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic, and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
And now the witch drew the black blade forth by the hilt, which was thick and on one side rounded, for she had cut a small groove in the soil below the hilt for this purpose, and began to sharpen both sides of the sword by rubbing them with a curious greenish stone, still singing over the sword an eerie song.
Alveric watched her in silence, wondering, not counting time; it may have been for moments, it may have been while the stars went far on their courses. Suddenly she was finished. She stood up with the sword lying on both her hands. She stretched it out curtly to Alveric; he took it, she turned away; and there was a look in her eyes as though she would have kept that sword, or kept Alveric. He turned to pour out his thanks, but she was gone.
