Sensible cop

I enjoyed reading this blog, which is published by a guy who comments on Astral Codex Ten.

The Chinese People Are Not a Problem, but China Really Is

Vice is stretching quite a bit at points here, trying to make yesterday's shootings in Atlanta evidence of some kind of broad anti-Asian sentiment; and especially in trying to avoid blaming the Chinese Communists for their role in spreading the virus. The Communists disappeared doctors who tried to give warnings to the world, while allowing international travel from Wuhan and elsewhere well after they knew it was a hazard. 

Still, Vice is right that this well-intended sentiment probably should have been thought out more than it was.

During a House Judiciary Committee meeting Thursday, Rep. Chip Roy said Texans “believe in justice” while simultaneously invoking the imagery of one of America’s most unjust legacies.  

“There’s old sayings in Texas about ‘Find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,’” Roy said Wednesday during the House Judiciary Committee meeting. “We take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.” 

On Tuesday eight people were killed and another was injured after a suspect is alleged to have bought a gun and targeted three spas in the Atlanta area. Most of the victims were Asian women.

In principle Roy was expressing anger at the murders, not racism towards Asians; his point was that murderers should be hanged, not that Asians ought to be. However, it's quite right to point out that the quality of justice in our lynching history was ugly at best.

As if Roy’s point wasn’t convoluted enough, it was also patently ahistorical. Lynchings are not, in fact, complimentary to the “rule of law.”  The 1871 “Chinese Massacre” in Los Angeles, in which at least 17 Asian immigrants were hanged, was one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history. 

If they'd stopped there, I'd have nothing to say against their argument, but they really shouldn't be using any of this to create defenses for the Communists. 

"My concern about this hearing is it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society, free speech, and away from the rule of law, taking out bad guys,” Roy added.

According to Roy, these “bad guys'' include the Chinese government, which he referred to as “Chi-Coms.” ... Former President Donald Trump often referred to COVID-19—which he repeatedly downplayed even as hundreds of Americans died on his watch—as the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” Current White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week that there was “no question” that Trump’s statements “led to perceptions of the Asian American community that are inaccurate, unfair,” and that they “elevated threats against Asian Americans.”

There's no reason that criticisms of the Chinese government, which is actively engaged in genocide and slavery, should redound even against the Chinese people -- let alone Asian-Americans. The People's Republic of China is a tyranny of the first water. There are plenty of good people in China, such as those who have recently been robbed of their cherished freedom in Hong Kong. 

Somehow our national conversation turned this weird murderer in Atlanta into a national problem, one that returns as always to the same themes. It would be good if we could stop trying to view every problem in America through the lens of racism and politics; but that is probably too much to hope for, as it is too valuable for a whole class of politicians. It would be nice if people like Roy would stop stepping in it in ways that give opportunity, but that may be too much to hope for as well.

What might still be avoidable is the new theme of protecting the PRC. They really are evil -- the government, I mean, not the people who live under it. Anyone who spins up a defense of the PRC out of any of these stories about America should be asked why, and challenged on the moral quality of doing so. If you think you oppose slavery, they are slavers. If you think you oppose genocide, they are murdering and sterilizing people today.

The Sons of Liberty

Looking for an old quote from Rio Grande, I came across this old post from 2005. I was so confident when I was young.

Things that go south in a serious way will be met with a serious response. We'll form lawful militias to keep order if the government breaks down under disease or disaster. We'll volunteer for government-led efforts if they need us, or form private companies to take care of the jobs the government can't handle.... What comes, comes, but however hard it is we shall stand and fight it. It is our way, as it is our heritage.

We are the Sons of Liberty. We have nothing to fear. When death comes for us, we will pass into that world of which so much has been written, where there is no fear but love and all love is without pain. If we have done our duty, we will leave behind us those we have bred or trained in the ways of America. They will take up our cause and bury our bones, and our names will be their warcry.

There are names like that written in gold, below. The men they trained will give them voice. They are warriors, heroes, and riders of bulls. Perhaps there is a name like that on your lips as you read this: Washington's? Jackson's? Your father's? Another?

So what is there to fear? Live boldly. This is America, the home of the brave.

God give me the strength to finish as I began. I don't mind to die at any time: even today is not too soon. Only let me die in such a way that this younger me would not be ashamed.

No, Not Consistency!

The Pentagon is worried.

During military training sessions to address extremism in the ranks, some service members have challenged why the Pentagon is not treating the violence during racial injustice protests last summer as equal to the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol. 

That the two events are viewed as equivalent by some troops has caught the Pentagon’s attention in its effort to educate service members that extremist views and activity — on either side of the political spectrum — go against the oath they took when they joined the military, the top enlisted leader told reporters on Thursday.

“This is coming from every echelon that we’re talking to,” said Ramón Colón-López, the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Possibly you should listen, if in fact every echelon is telling you the exact same thing. 

What, by the way, is "extremism," and why is it forbidden? The military has traditionally permitted extreme pacifists to serve, even accommodating them by finding nonviolent forms of service for them to perform. What exactly is the philosophical principle at work here? Thou shalt not depart from commonly held opinions... well, thou might depart X far, but not X+1? Where is the X? What is the 1? 

Exceptions and Rules

LTC(R) Samantha Nerove has an impressive record, as she explains in her recent article for The Federalist.

I couldn’t just barely meet the standards, because that would have given them ammunition to use against me. I had to crush the standards. And I did. I could easily do 100 push-ups in two minutes; got maximum scores on land navigation tests and always sprinted the entire course; and aced 12-mile road marches carrying 55-pound rucksacks (10 pounds more than the requirement). I weighed 120 pounds.

Now I know Sam, so I believe every word of that. What I think, though, is that she makes a great case for accepting her as an exception to an ordinary rule against women in the combat arms. All rules need exceptions, for the same reason that logical proofs don't really apply to physical things. There are going to be exceptional cases, and the rules should be weak enough to make room for things to be what they are.

That said, the ordinary situation is not that women of 120 pounds can or do crush military standards. The Army is having to redesign its combat fitness test because 65% of female soldiers fail it. And those are not recruits, but serving soldiers who have already been subject to the rigors of military discipline for some time.

There are a very few combat arms positions where women are really needed, such as for interoperations with male special operators who need to blend in to a mixed population rather than appearing as a military-aged-male unit. There are some similar positions, especially in medial units and civil affairs, where women can make a big difference in terms of the ability to move in female areas of households especially in the Islamic world. The exceptional cases could fill those out nicely.

For the vast majority of cases, however, it would be wise to adhere to the rule. Pass the test, or give way to someone who can. The Samanthas of the world will continue to crush whatever standards you put in their way, because it's very important to them to do that. They'll excel, and room should be made for them to excel. But the Army isn't made up of only exceptional individuals; like any sufficiently large organization, most of the members will be ordinary. Exceptions should be for the exceptional; a well-crafted fitness rule shouldn't be excepted for a general inability to meet it.

Plato's Parmenides V: The Tell

I've been trying to figure out how to approach the rest of the dialogue. This is where Parmenides is given the ability to speak most directly and plainly, and for himself. For that reason, I am disinclined to add a layer of summary or explication; maybe the best thing is to encounter it directly, with all that has been said before as support.

It's too long to quote, though, and probably will benefit from extended discussion. So let's try it this way: read it yourselves, encountering it directly. Ask any questions you have in the comments to this post. Then let's tackle it in three or four sessions next week.

Phil Sheridan Can Order What He Wants

In case any of you were curious about how the cavalry movie ends, it ends just this way.

A St. Patrick's Day Feast, VII: Rifles

It might be that some of you own a little Armalite. Perhaps some were lost in boating accidents recently. I hear that is common.

Hopefully there will be no reason to regret their loss in those boating accidents I hear so much about.

A St. Patrick’s Day Feast, VI

A St. Patrick’s Day Feast, V: The Actual Feast

Shepherds Pie and Irish soda bread. 

A St. Patrick's Day Feast, IV

Now back to our regularly-scheduled program.

A Germanic Interlude

We interrupt today's Celtic feasting for an attempted conversation between and Old English speaker and an Old Norse speaker, to see if in fact they were mutually intelligible languages.

Old English and modern Friesian are, in fact, sufficiently similar to be intelligible. 

A St. Patrick’s Day Feast, III

I love this one because, while it is “a traditional tune,” it was an error to claim it was in the period of the movie. The Fenian revolt was nearly contemporary to the American Civil War; this movie is supposed to have happened a few years after. The “old woman” who saw the Fenian men training in her youth would still have been young. 

It’s a fine song anyway. As mentioned below, this movie was made by John Ford’s players in order to fund The Quiet Man. The studio didn’t think a movie about Irish things was viable, and anyway it was going to be expensive to film on location. So they made Ford and Company film another cavalry movie to pay for it. 

The Quiet Man ended up making much more money.

A St. Patrick's Day Feast, II

The long fight scene from The Quiet Man. Don't watch it if you've not seen the movie; watch the movie, and you'll see it in a far better way.

A St. Patrick's Day Feast, I

Rio Grande

Now today is the right day to watch The Quiet Man, if you can. It is one of the greatest good movies ever made. But the Warner Bro's didn't think it could make any money, a movie about Irish Americans and Irishmen. 

So they told John Ford and John Wayne that they had to make another movie, a cavalry movie, to fund their Irish movie. It turned out to make more by far than the very successful Rio Grande.

There's a small matter of fitness: can you ride like the ancient Romans?

It breaks my heart to think how far we have fallen from this display of respect of man to woman; this loss of chivalry. We aren't half our grandfather's generation. God help us.

Extended Waylon

I'm mostly going to do St. Patrick's Day stuff today, though I'm not at all Irish except through the distant way in which the Scots are "Scotti" from Ireland once upon a time. However, this piece is an extended cut of a 1970s piece in which Waylon and his crew were at the very top of their game.

 

The songs are fun, but the real meat of it is when they are done singing and start playing.

Sovereign Crime

Perhaps the most important question of the moment in terms of self-governance, and whether it still exists.

Your government, at the state and federal level, the FBI, government agencies can be in on the scam.  That is the realization slowly being accepted by millions of Americans.

We have technologies that can identify dead voters the moment they cast a ballot.  We can identify people who are out-of-state, voted twice, are underage, live in a vacant lot or a UPS or FedEx postal box.  We can even show a photo of that vacant lot so you can see where your fake neighbor claims to live.

Literally, the second their ballot is counted, they can be flagged as a likely fraud.

Yes, we can deploy that technology today....

The question is, if the government is pretty much in on the election fraud, does it really matter?

It is important to note, however, that the government is not the sovereign. It may be that they have forgotten who the sovereign really is. 

“Seeing as How it’s Near the 17th of March...”

A hand extended in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

       

Not to spoil the fun, but the opening joke in that clip is immediately relevant to the Parmenides post below.

Plato's Parmenides IV: The Setup

After the great difficulties are raised, Socrates admits that his idea of Forms seems hard to defend. Parmenides agrees that it is very hard to defend, but in terms that strongly suggest that he nevertheless believes it must be right:

These, Socrates, said Parmenides, are a few, and only a few of the

difficulties in which we are involved if ideas really are and we determine

each one of them to be an absolute unity. He who hears what may be

said against them will deny the very existence of them-and even if

they do exist, he will say that they must of necessity be unknown

to man; and he will seem to have reason on his side, and as we were

remarking just now, will be very difficult to convince; a man must

be gifted with very considerable ability before he can learn that

everything has a class and an absolute essence; and still more remarkable

will he be who discovers all these things for himself, and having

thoroughly investigated them is able to teach them to others.

I agree with you, Parmenides, said Socrates; and what you say is very

much to my mind. 

And yet, Socrates, said Parmenides, if a man, fixing his attention

on these and the like difficulties, does away with ideas of things

and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate

idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which

his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning,

as you seem to me to have particularly noted. 

Parmenides is suggesting that, without the Forms as at least objects of thought, we cannot reason at all. He's also telling us something about the character of a Form: it is characterized by an essence, which is absolute and unitary. Not just some things of especially high and noble character must have Forms, but anything at all. 

Now we still have the difficulty of understanding whether these Forms are metaphysical or psychological. Parmenides' defense of them is that we need them to think; and if that is true, it is possible that the world doesn't have Forms in it, but rather that they are the way that our minds work. A thing then doesn't have an essence, but is assigned one by us. In this way, everything becomes an artifact, in a way: the thing in the world is not, but the thing as it exists in our mind is an artifact that we have made and assigned a purpose, our thought an artifact just as surely as if we had built a fork out of wood. We made the thing out of raw materials we found in the world, and assigned it a purpose to serve us. 

In that case, then, telos is real enough; but all the telos is human-made, and not inherent in the world. (This is roughly the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras' position: "Man is the measure of all things," as it is often given.)

Aristotle will not believe this; his assigning Form as not-separate from the things means that the form really is in the thing. We learn the form by examining the things; our minds grasp it from grappling with the things we encounter. Aristotle's Form is metaphysical, and also physical (but not material). Plato's, as presented in the Republic, is metaphysical but not physical. Parmenides isn't being clear about what he takes the nature of the Forms to be.

Socrates confesses that he has no idea how to proceed under the circumstances. Parmenides tells him this is because he is young, and as yet untrained in rhetoric and debate. If he developed skills in this kind of discourse, it would help him work out his philosophical ideas in a way that he is not ready to do yet.

Socrates asks him how to do this, and Parmenides gives a response he surely meant to be helpful.

I mean, for example, that in the case of this very hypothesis of Zeno's

about the many, you should inquire not only what will be the consequences

to the many in relation to themselves and to the one, and to the one

in relation to itself and the many, on the hypothesis of the being

of the many, but also what will be the consequences to the one and

the many in their relation to themselves and to each other, on the

opposite hypothesis. Or, again, if likeness is or is not, what will

be the consequences in either of these cases to the subjects of the

hypothesis, and to other things, in relation both to themselves and

to one another, and so of unlikeness; and the same holds good of motion

and rest, of generation and destruction, and even of being and not-being.

In a word, when you suppose anything to be or not to be, or to be

in any way affected, you must look at the consequences in relation

to the thing itself, and to any other things which you choose-to each

of them singly, to more than one, and to all; and so of other things,

you must look at them in relation to themselves and to anything else

which you suppose either to be or not to be, if you would train yourself

perfectly and see the real truth. 

Socrates finds this answer as mystifying as most readers do when they first encounter it. He asks for a practical example to help him understand how this process is supposed to work.

That, Parmenides, is a tremendous business of which you speak, and

I do not quite understand you; will you take some hypothesis and go

through the steps?-then I shall apprehend you better. 

That, Socrates, is a serious task to impose on a man of my years.

Nevertheless, that will be the business of the next part. Zeno and others present join in the request to hear Parmenides walk through an example at length, so that they can better understand how to perform this sort of inquiry. 

UPDATE: If your response to reading Parmenides' answer was similar to this, don't feel bad. It's perfectly normal.