This one is for Elise, a propos a discussion she and I and some others had some years ago about women in combat, and in our case on the flight line.
This battle took place on the edge of the Gaza Strip in a couple of Israeli kibutzes on 7 Oct.
The women's remarks are illuminating, a couple them reminiscent of Zara's comment re woman scorned, although Zara was mild and benevolent.
https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-first-women-led-armored-battle
Eric Hines
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the characters explains a ‘European-style gangster hit’, which he says consists of three shots: head, heart, and stomach. Yes, that should definitely ensure the target’s demise!It strikes me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for what is going on in America and in many other Western nations. In my analogy, ‘stomach’ represents the basic, essential physical infrastructure of society–energy and food supply, in particular. ‘Head’ represents the society’s aggregate thought processes: how decisions are made, how truth is distinguished from falsehood. And ‘heart’ represents the society’s spirit: how people feel about their fellow citizens, their families, friends, and associates, and their overall society.\
I reflect that this analogy is a fruitful one, but that the analogy can be furthered. The Mozambique Drill is a more effective form than this European one: the gangsters are more or less wasting the shot to the stomach, as stomach wounds are not immediately fatal, giving ample time for surgeons compared with wounds to the heart, lungs, or brain. Thus, 'two to the chest, one to the head' offers a greater surety of success at a similar preservation of ammunition (where ammunition preservation is not a concern, you can adopt the alternative 'two to the chest, face gets the rest' approach).
Likewise in the analogy, the execution is more certain if you can destroy the morale of the nation and the people; and destroying its stomach, as it were, leaves one in possession of less goods in the event of one's final victory. It would be wisest to preserve the 'stomach,' and to focus on destroying the heart and the head.
The failure of the analogy -- all analogies always break -- may lie in the fact that there is no assassin. The forces destroying the stomach are actually intending something else which they are allowing to destroy the thing that worked. In this way they are much more like a cancer than a bullet: the hope is to replace the functional organ with a set of 'green' things that would consume and replace the organ, but which can't actually fulfill the organ's functions. The head has quit working because it has grown old and ossified, with so many layers of decision-makers and processes that end up pursuing their own agendas in the place of their actual purpose. It is the kind of failure that attends natural death, the breakdown of the body's functional ordering of things that had been the feature of its youth and health.
As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States. As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
The State Department is technically correct about this. The relevant text is the opening lines of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Now the government of which his parents were diplomats no longer exists, and the Iranian state that does exist would provide no home for him. It would regard him as an American and delight in the abuses they would impose upon him if he were deported there. As such, he surely and legitimately qualifies for asylum here, and then for legal residence and eventual citizenship.
However, there are times when it is important to be able to set aside the law in the name of justice. Justice is not as simple as a rulebook, and never has been. The error was not his own, but the government's; and now, when he is 62, is no time to try to correct the error in this technical way.
Judges are not properly empowered to set aside the law, although they sometimes do, but juries can do so. It strikes me that the correct resolution here would be to put the matter to a jury for consideration, and almost any American jury would recognize that it would be unjust to try to pull the rug out from under his feet after six decades of having "been a good citizen," as he thought he was and as which he so behaved. If we're going to be deporting people for technical violations of the rules of immigration, there are literally tens of millions of people ahead of him in line.
When have I allowed that strong feeling tocause me to say or think something unkindabout another person? Specifically:• On social media: When has my engagement with(or about) those with whom I disagree failed torecognize their dignity as persons created in theimage of God?• In conversations: When was I so focused onwinning an argument that I failed to genuinelylisten? When was my choice of wordsuncharitable? When did I paint others indisrespectful ways or engage in personalattack?• In my day-to-day perceptions and attitudes: Whenhave I made assumptions about or failed togive the benefit of the doubt to those withwhom I disagree? When have I presumedothers’ intentions or experiences before evenhearing their stories or experiences? Whenhave I valued my political affiliation or partymore than my identity as a disciple of Christwho is called to model love and charity, evenin civil discourse?
I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.
This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited... by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.”
This is not dinner-table fare, so I'll put it past the jump. I trust your judgment about whether or not you would enjoy reading such things.
I think it best to weight heavily the opinions of those who read/hear their opponents' arguments and answer them.... [Mentioning a cautionary but unnamed example], I do not regard this as an intellectual failing, but an emotional one.... This is simply a cautionary tale that even later in life, after you have avoided many varieties of foolishness, such things (social and emotional rather than intellectual reasoning) can still hunt you down and make you stupid.
In spite of the fact that philosophy's most famous figure clearly comes down on one side of this, there is a contemporary debate about whether it is to engage in examining your life. (Also in psychology, where the consideration is not whether it is good but whether it is healthy.)
According to Jamison, not only is an unexamined life worth living; the rigorous examination of life should not be encouraged due to its possible negative effects on the participants and the entire society.2 In Jamison’s view, a consistent and unregulated examination of human life produces a feeling of ecstasy (a specie of spiritual feeling) in those who engage in it. The feeling, if allowed, could endanger both the thinker and the entire society. For Jamison, “once you get a taste of this kind of thing, you do not want to give it up”.3 Someone who engages in self-critical examination eventually becomes entangled with it. Socrates became entangled in dialectics, became unpopular, was accused of corrupting the youth and eventually sentenced to death....
As a matter of fact, Jamison’s position has a lacuna. He (Jamison) never rejects the method of self-critical examination. He recommends a form of social regulation whereby only a very few individuals are allowed to embrace the method. In his words, “there is no doubt in my mind that it is important for a community to have members that engage in critical thinking, and the examined life, but I also think it important to point out that it is not good for a community to have too many members doing this."
Like a lot of contemporary philosophy, we jump immediately to elitism: it's not good for 'too many' people to be examining their own lives. Society would be more stable, and the goods of a stable society more enduring, if people would just stop doing that (engaging instead, as the psychology article suggests, chiefly with sports, fashion, and the like).
Now -- on the other hand, in the spirit of "[considering] their opponents' arguments and answer them" -- there is a non-elitist form of this argument that might be persuasive. It comes from Joseph Schumpeter, most famous as the economist who showed why Marx's predictions for capitalism had failed. He nevertheless expected the downfall of capitalist society, precisely because it educated too many of its youth.
Schumpeter believed that the enormous productivity of capitalism would easily churn out the goods needed for basic consumption, freeing up labour from the fields and factories to enjoy a leisurely life in the new modern intellectual class of academics, journalists and bureaucrats. This class would be so separated and removed from the actual process of entrepreneurship and production, they would turn against the very philosophical foundations and institutions of the economic system that made their lives possible. Not understanding the roots of their own condition, they spend their daily efforts deliberately working to undermine the systems of private property, private contracting, decentralized decision-making, entrepreneurship and voluntary exchange. They condemn capitalism as a foregone conclusion and view any pro-capitalism position as crazy and anti-social.
I think the appropriate counter is that very few of these many are really engaged in self-examination, neither of their own lives nor of the systems of thought into which they have been inculcated. Critical theory in all its forms contains a basic structural problem that I have never heard anyone but myself describe, and certainly none of its advocates. I say that it is a problem, not an error, because it is necessary for the sort of enquiry it proposes.
The problem is this: in order to engage in critical theoretical enquiries, it is necessary to make an assumption about society and treat it as if it is true, but in order to get to true answers, the truth of the assumption has to be verified independently. Strict logic likewise can derive from assumptions to conclusions with truth-preservation, but you have to verify the truth of the assumptions outside the system of logic. Thus:
Assumption: A or B
Assumption: Not A
Conclusion: Therefore, B.
The conclusion is true if and only if the assumptions are both true, and logic won't tell you whether or not they are in fact true. You have to go look and see if, e.g., it is the case that "not A."
Critical Race Theory, currently the most famous, ends up providing strong evidence against its basic assumption: "Assume that, in spite of evidence, all of our social, legal, and economic institutions are really designed to ensure white supremacy." If you make that assumption and treat it as true, well, human beings are fantastic storytellers. You can tell all kinds of stories about how this or that thing really is about white supremacy. I'm not even against doing this, as it sometimes provides useful insight into ways we could reform some institutions to be fairer to people regardless of race. However, the fact that we are often motivated to institute such reforms is itself evidence against the truth of the assumed proposition.
If you went back to the Jim Crow South, for example, and pointed out that the grandfather clause had the apparently unintentional effect of disenfranchising Freedmen, no one would be interested in your proposal of reform. In an actual such society, no such reforms would be desired. The fact that we engage in the enquiry with the intent to reform is evidence against the proposition; the fact that we actually do reform could even be said to disprove it.
Yet people get so caught up in the stories that they were telling that they miss this. They end up motivated socially, as AVI says; but also emotionally, as he says. They fall in love with the stories they have crafted, and don't get as far as enquiring as to whether or not the exercise doesn't itself disprove the assumption. It may still be a useful exercise, if it generates helpful reforms that improve the decency of society. Yet the motivation of decent reformation proves, if anything, that the critical assumption was false.
Obviously I am inclined to Socrates' view, and Plato's, and Aristotle's; that is the real motivation behind this two-decade-long blog. I don't think the problem is that too many people are taught to be intellectually critical of society; I think it's that too few of them are taught to do it well and thoroughly.
Spatchcocking a turkey is almost like carving a Blood Eagle, except that you don’t have to pull the lungs out and salt them because they were already removed.
After the National Weather Service issued a hazardous weather outlook and red flag warning due to hurricane-force gusts and high fire risk in the area, Elkmont and Cades Cove campgrounds were closed....A red flag warning was in effect until the afternoon of Nov. 21 for the Smokies, which means very low humidity and stronger winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger. Last night, wind gusts were expected to increase to between 40 and 70 mph at night, with up to 80 mph gusts possible in some locations.During these high-risk conditions, a wildfire broke out the evening of Nov. 20 in the Tennessee side of the park near Rich Mountain Road.... The cause of the fire is under investigation, and no structures or properties were threatened as of Nov. 20. However, an early-morning voluntary evacuation of homes near the park boundary in Blount County, Tennessee, was conducted on Nov. 21, officials say.The Great Smoky Mountains is currently under a burn ban, prohibiting all campfires and charcoal use until further notice. However, that didn’t stop one woman from intentionally setting two fires, which were quickly extinguished by park officials along a road in the North Carolina portion of the Great Smokies.The woman was arrested, with federal and state charges pending.
Here are some newer singers doing Western music. Some of them also do country music, including my favorite genre Outlaw Country, but these are Western pieces.
More after the jump.
There's been quite a bit of talk about the possibility that Israel intends to purge Gaza, perhaps by driving the population into Egypt -- which says they're prepared "to sacrifice millions" to prevent having to accept the Gazans -- or in some other manner.
I don't know if they're intending that or not, although I notice that they're getting a lot of heat for it compared to the President of Syria, who expelled 14 million citizens who didn't get along with the government. In addition to that, though, there's some missing context: this is very much a two-way street. The Islamic world has been ethnically cleansing itself of Jews since Israel was founded in 1948; some having, prior to that, collaborated with the Nazi movement on the subject.*
Those Syrian refugees are better off in Germany than they ever were in Syria, and certainly better off than if they'd stayed to fight for ten more years. A happier future doesn't run through diplomacy, but victory: it's time for American officials to take their hands off the wheel, and let this sort itself out. Both sides really want the same thing: they hate each other and want to be separate. What they have to work out is something that can only be worked out one way. Peace will be possible once they've had their fill of war, and not because someone put a lid on the conflict while both sides felt like they could still have won more if only the fight had kept going.
* From that link: "Local militant and nationalistic societies, like the Young Egypt Party and the Society of Muslim Brothers, circulated reports claiming that Jews and the British were destroying holy places in Jerusalem, and other false reports that hundreds of Arab women and children were being killed."
Some of you may recall AVI talking a while back about a conference he went to on the Inklings, which included a talk about the Holy Grail by Dr. Sørina Higgins. She has now published in "The Great Courses" a piece entitled "C. S. Lewis: Writer, Scholar, Seeker." It's now available as an audiobook.
Although his career is much richer and more varied than a single series of tales for children, Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis is perhaps best-known for his beloved fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. Born in Belfast near the end of the 19th century, Lewis had a difficult childhood and lived through the devastation of two world wars. Yet, his work most often celebrates joy, optimism, and spiritual meaning, rather than dwelling on the darkness he had experienced.
In C. S. Lewis: Writer, Scholar, Seeker, Dr. Sørina Higgins will take you on a fascinating expedition through the life and work of this influential author, examining the crucial events and relationships that shaped his personal, literary, and spiritual journeys. As you’ll see, while Lewis holds a special place in the canon of modern fantasy literature—along with his friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien—the fantastic was not his only interest. His wide-ranging imagination and constant curiosity led him to write everything from religious essays to science fiction while also pursuing his career as an Oxford fellow and tutor and literary scholar. As you trace Lewis’ life from his unhappy days at boarding school to his final years, Dr. Higgins will spotlight the connections between his lived experience and the creation of his work, illuminating the ways his literary efforts reflected his personal pursuit of meaning and connection.
The story of Lewis’ life and literary achievements is one of both historical specificity and timeless, eternal themes. Though Lewis was certainly a man of his times and subject to many of the biases and restrictions of his era, as Dr. Higgins highlights, he never stopped growing and embracing new ways of thinking. And today, more than half a century after his death, his work lives on, entertaining and enlightening new generations of readers all over the world.
I'm sure that will be of interest to many of you. Dr. Higgins is a very nice person as well as a scholar, so it should be pleasant as well as intellectually engaging.
