Captain Blood
For one reason and another, until just now I had never read the once-popular novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. It is exactly the sort of book I would have liked in my teens and twenties, kin to The Three Musketeers and its ilk. I've also never seen the movie, the one which launched the career of Errol Flynn and gave rise to other movies I've enjoyed such as 1935's The Adventures of Robin Hood. I will review it here, past a jump to avoid spoiling it for anyone who would like to read it.
Aristotle's Ethics in One Brief Lesson
While the best way to study Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is to read the whole thing carefully, over and over, and then read Aquinas' adaptation and commentary, most students these days do not ever take a philosophy class at all. Those who do often only take one survey course, and it is necessary to convey the basics quickly.
With this in mind, I have decided that you could teach an excerpted form of the EN fairly quickly. This would be the necessary introductory materials from Book I, and then the virtues of courage, justice, and magnanimity.
The reason to approach it this way is as follows.
1) The introductory materials are necessary, so included.
2) Courage is the easiest virtue to teach and serves as a model for all the rest. It's easy to grasp what it is, and why it is a virtue/strength/excellence. Once students grasp the model, you can just hand-wave indicate how self-control is obviously a virtue in the same way.
3) Justice serves as a _substitute_ for virtue, because the lawfulness component requires laws that compel people to act the way that a virtuous person would (or face punishment). In that way, it 'can be said to be complete virtue,' but really isn't. Courage comes up again here too: the laws should compel you to go fight or face death, so that you'll go fight like a courageous person (but because you're afraid of being put to death, not because you have the virtue).
4) Magnanimity is actually complete virtue, and in fact a crowning quality that one can only obtain once one already really does have all the virtues. It's an alternative model for complete virtue from justice, but the one that actually entails virtue. The contrast will help them see how the system is really supposed to be completed; but justice has to do for most people, because most people aren't actually virtuous.
This would only be the briefest of introductions, but students would leave with a functional mental model of how the system works: what ethics is, what a virtue is, why justice (which we hear so much about these days) is only a substitute for virtue, and what true and complete virtue really looks like. You could teach this in a long afternoon or one week in a semester, and it should stick with them ever after.
Those who develop the taste for it can read the whole book. For the rest, as Tolkien says, it's enough to go along with.
A Good Night Locally
The elections are the subject of a lot of discussion today, for obvious reasons; but at least locally, things went as well as I could have wanted. There is a lot to be said for concentrating on the local right now: the national government is subject to a deeply divided populace, as are many state governments, but locally a lot can still be done. Communities often agree on the problems that face them, even if in a larger context there is division.
The only race I cared about particularly was the local sheriff, where Iraq war veteran Doug Farmer carried the day. He becomes the first Republican sheriff in Jackson County in a hundred years, or right at it. All the candidates came to the fire department to talk to us, and all but him said the same thing: 'Drugs are the biggest problem, and if you vote for me I will seek additional Federal resources to tackle that problem.' Farmer said, 'Drugs are the biggest problem, and they're being sold out of the same houses they've been sold out for years. We know where they are, and we know who is doing it. Vote for me and I'll go walk across their porch, knock on their door, and run them out of town or send them to prison if they won't stop.' We'll see if he does what he said he would do, but if he does he has the right kind of courage for the job.
Offices like this are a kind of honor, and honor is properly the reward of virtue. One ought to award the honor of the office to the person who has the specific virtues that office requires. The problem with our nation is that instead our system has devolved into awarding offices of honor to those who prove they are adequately corrupt to keep the money train going. People move up to higher offices not because of their demonstrated virtues, but because of their demonstrated capacity to make the money flow. Here was an exception, and a chance to award an office according to the virtues that merit it. Hopefully he will do well; hopefully, we might find more chances to award offices in the proper way.
Shenanigans
Last night at 1:45 AM the county paged out an all-stations-call to let us know that 911 was down, and there were large-scale phone service outages for the government statewide. We were directed to man all stations and not rely on dispatch services like usual. Phone lines came back up six hours later; 911 services went back down this afternoon, though they are reportedly working now.
Both my internet service provider and my cell phone's AT&T internet service, two different corporations with completely different infrastructure, were offline simultaneously this afternoon for several hours.
I have not heard any explanation of all this, but it sounds rather like a cyber attack; and there was a significant outage just two weeks ago affecting North Carolina government. Officially this was because crack cyber security agents recognized a danger and took systems offline to fix it; but as the article says, the governor "is being tight-lipped" about the outages, and no word at all has come down about today's.
Today is of course the midterm election day. The National Guard has been called out for just this purpose, although I'm not sure what being 'called out' actually means for a cyber unit.
In North Carolina, cyber units have trained state entities and officials in most counties, according to Maj. Gen. Marvin Hunt, adjutant general for that state’s Guard. He said the work of his cyber team will “surge during the election to ensure that we have 24-hour coverage throughout this whole process.”“We’re really that third party that comes in—it’s just assisting them—to give them a different look, so that on election day, we can all have confidence in our election systems,” Hunt said.Neely told Defense One that few states are strong enough in the cyber arena, and the need is only growing.Security professionals hired by states often face “military-grade adversaries” they aren’t equipped to counter, said Brig. Gen. Gent Welsh, assistant adjutant general and commander of the Washington Air National Guard.
Keep your eyes open, and take special care in case your local 911 service goes down. In the event of an emergency and the service isn't working, go to your local fire department, police station, or emergency medical service facility and report the emergency in person. Go to whichever one is closest. They'll have radios that work even if the phones are out.
It's not a bad idea to have the local phone number written down somewhere in case the phone lines work but the 911 services don't. People call the station here all the time rather than dialing 911, and for many purposes that works very well. In an emergency 911 is usually a better option because it allows the dispatcher to contact everyone who needs to respond at once, but it is good to have options.
More Songs of Dying on the Highway
I just posted that song by the Barnyard Stompers because it's my favorite one that they do, but as I was reflecting on it today I realized that 'death on the highway' is a pretty significant theme for touring Texas bands. I guess if you are a band that makes its living on the road, and your roads happen to be in Texas, you spend an awful lot of time on those highways. Enough time, manifestly, for existential angst to set in.
Here's one by Bob Wayne, who is one of my favorites working today.
It'll probably be Sunday when most of you see this, so you might want to pass over that one until Monday or next weekend.
Here's one that goes with the last post, because half of it's about dying on the road and the other half is about college sports teams.
There are doubtless more. If you have a favorite, add it in the comments.
Justice on the Gridiron
One rarely encounters anything close to true justice in the world; one never meets any Platonic form in the street, but Justice in particular seems unlikely to show its face among human beings.
Today, however, we did see something close. The committee that decides such things had chosen to rank the University of Tennessee's football team #1 in the nation because it was undefeated, and had beaten Alabama. It placed the Georgia Bulldogs at #3 even though they were also undefeated and the defending national champions.
What happened today was that Georgia played Tennessee.
It was a very professional, strategic destruction. Georgia went up three touchdowns to two field goals in the first half, and then spent the second half denying the field on a prevent basis. They didn't get greedy; they didn't try to run up the score. They just burned the clock. Tennessee finally scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter, but it never got close to coming back. Georgia only scored one more field goal, but scoring more points was not their tactical priority. They had plenty of points; they needed to bleed the clock for every point they allowed. The opposing quarterback, a promising young man named Hooker, was sacked six times.
Justice is likely to be done in the next set of standings.
Don't Mind Dying on the Highway
That's the Outlaw country / metal band known as the Barnyard Stompers. If any of you like that and are inclined to the highway, they'll be playing tomorrow night at the Bobarossa Saloon.
By Their Fruits
Or, why black Republicans 'ain't'... er, acceptable.
How can we distinguish between the different types of Black Republicans? Johnson contends, “we can judge them by their words and deeds.”What type of Black Republican is Stuber? He was recruited by White Republican leadership to run against Ammons, the only African American clerk in Champaign County history. Like Deering, “the hard, overt and aggressive” White supremacist, Stuber is an election denier.And like the incompetent, subliterate and coonish Herschel Walker, Stuber reiterates “massa” Trump’s talking points. Intimating fraud, he cast aspersions on the 2020 elections. Stuber alleged votes were not counted in Georgia and Arizona, and further declared, “Champaign County may have stopped counting. I don’t know.” But during a late August interview with The News-Gazette’s Tom Kacich, he dissembled when asked if Trump had won. Again, disingenuously claiming uncertainty, he stated, “I don’t know if he truly was the winner.”About a month later, similar to Walker and nearly all election deniers, Stuber miraculously backtracked. Without explanation, he affirmed, “Joe Biden was legally elected president of the United States.” I find his reversal unbelievable. Indeed, I believe it’s a tactical move to deceive the electorate.
Now, if any of you had written anything like the remarks about Herschel Walker being forwarded there, people would be rightly outraged and deem the speech explicitly racist.
I do wish people would stand by the honest and demonstrable truth that the election was illegal in that it was conducted on terms altered by executive branch officials without legislative input, and therefore unconstitutional in that the Constitution clearly states that the legislative branch shall set the terms of elections; and that, therefore, there is no legitimate government of the United States. That is, however, perhaps an unacceptable position for anyone of a conservative temperament: on the principle of 'the king is dead, long live the king,' the idea is that the government cannot be so impermanent as to cease to exist except in the most extraordinary of cases. To hold otherwise is to court the chaos of the world, which whatever else violates that most conservative principle of stability.
For people to be forbidden from raising the point that the election was extremely dodgy at minimum, however, is silly. It was conducted with radical departures from the rules established by the laws of many of the states involved in it, every one of which made it less secure. Questions about its legitimacy should be perfectly acceptable, as should be insistences that future elections abide by the law or that laws should be crafted to create more certainty and credibility for election results.
Normality
It's hard to realize how bad things have gotten outside of the wilderness in which I have fastened myself. I used to go to this part of Union Station on a regular basis, and it was as advertised a thriving shopping district. Here, where we have happy children and dogs, hikers and backpackers, picnics and boat trips, everything seems like America hasn't changed all that much. I have to look at the news to remember that Washington, D.C. has turned itself into a post-apocalyptic nightmare -- as has San Francisco and many other cities.
Probably a lot more Americans live in the parts of the nation that have horrified themselves than elsewhere, though. The country has been badly hurt even if there remain oases beyond the concrete.
Search & Rescue in Panthertown
At least they picked a pretty place to get lost.
A map of today's SAR area.
Aside from taking a while, this rescue went as well as you could want. The hikers had a chilly night. One of them had fallen into a creek during the previous day, so her clothes were wet. They were from Colorado, so they weren't used to land navigation in heavily forested country where even clear landmarks can be obscured by trees and ridges. Making a fire in an alpine rainforest like this is not like making a fire out West, either: it takes a special skillset to know how to obtain sufficiently dry wood and get it going in this environment.
Still and all, everyone is fine and now back on their way to food and rest somewhere warm and dry.
R.I.P. Southern Icons
Jerry Lee Lewis, wildest of pianists and rockabilly lord, died this week after a false report earlier in the week. He was recently inducted into the County Music Hall of Fame, having long been in the one for rock and roll.
When I was at UGA, his wife and he and I went to the same church. I never met either of them, though, because they were such celebrities locally that they were always mobbed.
Vince Dooley, legendary coach who led the Georgia Bulldogs to their previous national championship four decades ago, also passed on this week.
The National Defense Strategy
The Biden administration put out a National Security Strategy last year; the Office of the Secretary of Defense has now put out its companion piece, the National Defense Strategy. This will inform the National Military Strategy yet to come from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As a high level strategic document, it's not terrible except in one huge way: it demonstrates that OSD thinks it still has a lot of time. This is made clear right at the beginning.
President Biden has stated that we are living in a “decisive decade,” one stamped by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment. The defense strategy that the United States pursues will set the Department’s course for decades to come. The Department of Defense owes it to our All-Volunteer Force and the American people to provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead...
Frankly they'll be lucky if they've got a year before some of these bills come due. Some of it is here already, and more of it is coming faster than 'by the end of this decade' or 'in the crucial years ahead.'
Magic Drinks and Poisons
Professor Emeritus Ann Sheffield begins with the Saga of Olav Tryggvason. It's about twenty minutes for those of you who, like me, enjoy discussions of Norse sagas.
Psychology of Woke
Definitely a confirmation bias issue here, but this does fit my experience of the people I have personally known who partake in this stuff.
One ought always to be suspicious of attempts to psychoanalyze people who have not actually been examined in person, or to apply psychoanalysis [apparently I was not using the right term; see comments. -Grim] not to individuals but groups. Combining that with my own confirmation bias issues on the subject, I can't actually place any confidence in these conclusions; but I forward them for discussion by those of you who might feel competent to do so.
Honors
One of these is me, Christmas 2008. One of the others in the photo, a good friend of mine, sent it to me today. I must have been just back from outside the wire, because I was in armor with a pack slung over my shoulder. I have no memory of what I might have been doing.
Strength Sports & Exploitation
The Washington Post has an exposé today on exploitation of female bodybuilders. Because of the well-known differential in average male and female desires and visual nature of much male desires, these things are always about women being exploited. Gay males do it to males, too, but at a much reduced rate simply because of numbers. Of all the forms of exploitation we regularly encounter, this seems to have been less violent and aggressive than we often find: soft-core rather than otherwise, consensual rather than otherwise, coerced only by offers of money, denial of fair treatment for those who didn't play, or promises of favoritism in treatment if you did.
Possibly this is because the women were stronger than the men who sought to coerce them! Physical strength is a virtue in the strict sense, and has the pragmatic consequences of being protective as well as enabling one to do certain practical things that others cannot do.
I would advance the hypothesis, though, that this would not be found to the same degree in the other strength sports that women participate in -- I mean my own sport of Strongman ("Strongwoman") and Power Lifting. Of the three, bodybuilding is intensely focused on perfecting physical appearance rather than performance at lifting or carrying weight. This results in body styles that are less attractive, but more functional.
These charts are about men, but it's not all that different.
Hollywood loves the bodybuilder physique, the triangular one with the abs and the v-cuts. Conan the Cimmerian tends to be portrayed in movies by bodybuilders like Arnold or Jason Momoa, and also artists who depict Conan usually do so in the bodybuilder physique since Frank Frazetta. They are not, though, as strong as those with the rectangular physique and the thick core muscles. They are just preferred aesthetically. Bodybuilding as a sport focuses on achieving that aesthetic, not on lifting huge weights or carrying them over distances or through obstacles.
My hypothesis is that people who are erotically motivated by sight of strong people probably gravitate towards bodybuilding in a way that they don't towards the other communities. Women who want to compete in a strength sport without such exploitation thus probably have a live option. Women who want to look good in a bodybuilder way, say like a comic book heroine like Red Sonja, are beginning from a path of looking attractive rather than being strong, and that is going to tend to lead to encounters with men like these.
That's not a moral judgment; you should do what you want. If you want to look good, though, you're probably going to have to develop stronger "coping skills" as Mr. Hines likes to call it.
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