tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9519743214446339382024-03-14T01:53:27.341-07:00TestudoMelesWilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-24920548083263696212015-07-22T06:15:00.000-07:002015-07-22T06:15:35.439-07:00Murdering 9 People Doesn't Make You CrazyI began writing this after Charleston. After Chattanooga, I feel like it is relevant.<br /><br />As predictably as clockwork, people began talking about 'mental health' immediately after the massacre at Mother Emmanuel. Before the coroner's reports on the 9 victims were complete, before the murderer was captured, people were talking about 'mentally unstable' people and their penchant for mass shootings. This assumption is telling - without knowing anything, many people had decided that a mentally ill person had killed those people.<br />
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Now we have the murderer in custody. He has confessed. But there is a catch - he has never been diagnosed with a mental illness. What we do know about him is that he dropped out of the 9th grade, may have been abusing opioids (he was caught with one). He had become reclusive and made people nervous. But this is not the same thing as him being ill.<br />
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And yet, I still see people mention 'mental health issues' and describe him as 'mentally unstable'. Most tellingly, I have heard it asserted that the simple fact that he murdered 9 people means that the killer was 'mentally unstable.' And I think that is the rub. In our discourse, it has been decided that the simple act of mass murder is itself evidence of mental illness. This is a problem.<br />
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It is a problem for a variety of reasons. First, mental illness is already a vague enough concept. It is defined by a complicated and subjective set of diagnostic criteria. But as flawed as they are, these criteria are what we have. They are defined by sets of symptoms and behaviors. While there are variety of illnesses in the DSM that include violent behavior, there is no entry in the manual that simply says 'murder 9 people' as a diagnostic criteria. Because mental illness is not defined by a single act but by -patterns- of behavior over time. Throwing that out the window in our popular discourse just makes a vague concept vaguer.<br />
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I think at it's root this imprecise pathologizing and medicalizing of evil (and that is what it is, evil) serves mostly to condemn, not to describe. When we say he is crazy we are saying the the murderer is bad and wrong and twisted. What would once have been called evil. Perhaps a lot of people today have become so uncomfortable with the word 'evil' and so search for a substitute - so we replace morality with bad medicine.<br /><br />Moreover, this casual conflation of mental illness an murder only serves to further stigmatize the mentally ill. Because the conflation is aimed at -condemning- someone as broken and twisted, it reinforces the idea that all mentally ill people are broken and twisted and perhaps, dangerous. I am friends with many people with serious mental illness. And I won't sit idly by while they are lumped with murderers because my fellow citizens lack the guts to say the word 'evil'.<br />
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So call the murderer's actions evil. Call him evil. Just don't call any of it crazy.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-34032788510740857672015-07-14T10:39:00.000-07:002015-07-14T10:39:01.225-07:00Appreciation is InterpretationI have often thought of beauty as something that simply -was-. It was something out there, waiting to be experienced, that would strike my mind and my sense fully formed. This is implicit in how we speak about beauty - when we talk about something being 'striking' or 'breathtaking' we imply an immediate assault on our minds by overwhelming grandeur.<br />
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The Corollary of this is that the appreciation of beauty is antithetical to knowledge. It is not that one must be ignorant to admire beauty, but that interpretation and understanding are separate from appreciation. We can be in awe, or we can understand. We cannot do both.<br />
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I think this is wrong. Our minds do not passively receive sensory input - they process it based on what we know. If we do not know what we are looking at, we cannot distinguish one thing from another - in a very real sense, we cannot see it. In the absence of knowledge, everything we see is 'that thing there' or 'that other thing' - if we stop to examine, we may notice slight differences between two things, but we will not differentiate the objects as we take in the whole.<br />
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I was thinking about this while I was hiking on top of the Allegheny Front a bit more than a week ago. It was a beautiful hike. As I looked around I knew what those bushes were, covered in flowers, on each side of the trail - mountain laurel. And I knew that those larger shrubs, barely coming into bloom, were Rhododendrons or 'Great Laurel'. I knew which trees were birches, and could pick out the pines from the spruce. And because I knew most of what I saw, the plants I didn't know stuck out to me, and I could ask and learn that was a 'mountain ash' and the particular type of pine there was a Table Mountain Pine. Those little points of ignorance were as noticeable as all the plants I knew, because they were an exception.<br />
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If I did not know a birch from a beech, if I did not know a spruce from a pine, I do not know what I would see. I suppose I wouldn't see the trees for the forest. And I wonder if there are cases where someone 'doesn't really care for nature' where the cause is not an aesthetic insensitivity, but simply ignorance. Putting an ignorant hiker in the middle of the forest is like sitting down a music novice at the opera, or taking someone who knows nothing of painting to an art museum. If they feel nothing, perhaps it is because they can't feel without first knowing.</div>
Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-79695981392087167132015-05-14T10:09:00.000-07:002015-05-15T10:36:16.090-07:00The History Nerd's Guide to Wolf Hall Pt 1 - CostumeLike everyone else that goes apeshit about stuff on PBS, I've been devouring Wolf Hall. Everything that's been said about it is true. It's beautifully put together, astonishingly faithful in its details, beautifully acted, all of it. It's lush and alien and fascinating and the final episode is brutally riveting.<br />
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But on another level, as a history nerd, the show is a candy store of references. It's like Wreck-it-Ralph for people that own copies of 'The Tudor Tailor' and obsess over Renaissance music and Holbein paintings.<br />
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About those paintings. It's been said that the shots are composed like paintings. And one of the main reasons for this is a number of the shots -are- paintings. A lot of the costumes for characters are just whatever that character is wearing in their portrait. What follows is me gushing about the details for several paragraphs, with a focus on costumes. In the next post I'll talk about set design.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Hans_Holbein,_the_Younger_-_Sir_Thomas_More_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Hans_Holbein,_the_Younger_-_Sir_Thomas_More_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" height="400" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hobein's potrait of Thomas More, 1527. Currently in the Frick.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://d.christiantoday.com/en/full/25636/thomas-more.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://d.christiantoday.com/en/full/25636/thomas-more.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas More as portrayed in Wolf Hall</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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TV Thomas More has the same outfit as he does in his portrait - same hat, same gown, same velvet doublet. He has the same haircut. The same iconic stubble. For someone whose seen the painting, the recognition is instant:"Oh, that doublet" - maybe because those sleeves are one of the richest portrayals of fabric in Western Art. It also stamps the character, indelibly, as Thomas More. Just look for the sleeves and there he is. Now, sure, this is a great Easter egg for Holbein fanboys and girls. But the way the show uses this costume is brilliant. On the one hand, that red silk velvet is a the second or third most expensive fabric available - behind cloth of gold (which is what it sounds like) and broacde. On the other hand, with his careless food stains and bad posture More manages to make a fur-trimmed gown and that crimson silk doublet look schlubby, like it's the Tudor equivalent to the hoodie of some guy that lives off of Soylent. He wears velvet, but his attitude proclaims to the world 'I am above this.' This shows the way in which his character has one foot in power politics and another foot planted (perhaps hypocritically) in an idealized spiritual life.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Cromwell%2CThomas(1EEssex)01.jpg/856px-Cromwell%2CThomas(1EEssex)01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Cromwell%2CThomas(1EEssex)01.jpg/856px-Cromwell%2CThomas(1EEssex)01.jpg" height="400" width="333" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Cromwell, as painted by Hobein 1532-33</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EdXSO9ks_Vw/VVYuP0gcDlI/AAAAAAAAHBU/GcEX5upZW50/s1600/6f871fbbb93829c59a29d4f7924ca3e9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="233" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EdXSO9ks_Vw/VVYuP0gcDlI/AAAAAAAAHBU/GcEX5upZW50/s320/6f871fbbb93829c59a29d4f7924ca3e9.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Cromwell sits for his portrait in Wolf Hall</td></tr>
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This is an even more explicit shout out, since we see Holbein painting the portrait in the show. Again, the costume is nearly identical. A great detail is the torquoise ring on his left index finger. The show makes it particularly significant by making it Wolsey's final gift to his protege. Unlike More, who was born to a knightly family, the commoner Cromwell wears a sumptuous but restrained black gown. True blacks were expensive but they were not showy. This gown a way for Cromwell to proclaim himself as a man of substance without stepping on any titled toes - in addition to being a faux pas, sumptuary laws made it illegal for commoners to wear richer fabrics. Another great detail in the screen cap is the quill, which has had its barbs cut down (to hold more easily) and the letter, which is folded up in the correct pre-19th century fashion. As a footnote, I'm thankful that Mark Rylance is better looking than the historical Cromwell.<br />
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<br />Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-60921527235127724812015-03-03T18:35:00.002-08:002015-05-16T15:30:40.084-07:00Dragon Age Grows UpDragon Age: Origins came out when I was fresh out of college and living in a shitty
apartment where the heat didn't really work. I'd started a job I didn't
love to pay rent and I was thinking of life as something I was doing
until I did the next big thing. I'd play Origins late at night with a
lap blanket and still end up shivering (this was a winter when it didn't
get above 20 for 2 week on end. In Maryland of all places) <br />
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And Origins seemed right for where I was in life. It had a lot of
stories about characters finding their destiny and coming to terms with
their childhood. Of the 'core cast' of Leliana, Morrigan, Alistair and
the Warden (most of the versions thereof), I think their average age
seems well under 25. They haven't done great deeds yet, they either
haven't really started or they are starting over. Their stories seemed
to revolve around being a bastard, or being the traumatized and
sheltered child of a a demon woman, or <insert fucked up Warden
family situation here>. The oldest of the 4, Leliana, adopted an
affected innocence. I mean, there was an option to have the two virgins
in the group (I am assuming this about Morrigan) deflower each other.
Morrigan would freak out at the prospect of falling in love in a way
only a true innocent could. The games title, 'Origins' said it all. This
was a game about beginnings. About starting out and where you came
from.<br />
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I'm nearly 30 now. Still have a job I don't love, but I'm thinking
of the life I live as an end and not just a means to what comes next.
I'm married. I play Dragon Age Inquisition in my well-heated and
less-shittily furnished house. I romanced Cassandra, who bears a
passing resemblance (mostly "-disgusted noise-" to my wife). And when I
play I meet characters who are not defined by their childhood.
Characters who have done things. Cassandra is in her late-ish 30's,
she's been right hand of the divine for 18 years. She's grown disillusioned with the chantry and her own order while
retaining her faith; she's loved and lost. That's what defines her, not what happened to her
brother when she was young. Leliana is now 10 years older, and she's not
defined by what happened with Marjorlaine, but by all the ways that
spying for 10 years has twisted her soul. Iron Bull is scarred by a
brutal counterinsurgency and already well on his way to building a new
identity for himself in Thedas. Vivienne was formerly one of the most
powerful mages in Orlais, and Cullen isn't haunted by what happened when
he was a kid, but by all the awful shit he's endured during the past 2
games. If Origins was a game about rather young people making their way
in the world (and saving it), Inquisition is a game about people coming
to terms with what they've done in the world and who they've become.
It is not a story about young people anymore. It's a story about grown
ups. And maybe I've changed. Maybe the games changed. I think we both
have.<br />
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And this is not to say that Origins was adolescent in a negative
sense. Or that stories about coming of age are bad. Dostoevsky wrote
almost exclusively about the problems of young men and he is one of the
greatest novelists, well, ever. But for years the games I played were
about adolescents or post adolescents, and those stories are
well-travelled. It's nice to see other stories being given the
spotlight.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-83332095772107976602014-12-31T10:39:00.002-08:002014-12-31T10:39:30.939-08:00Album of the Year - 2014Just about any year he releases an album, David Eugene Edwards puts himself in contention for the most interesting, inventive music of the year. It's what he does -- there is no one like him, not even within the lilliputian subgenre of Gothic Americana, and certainly no one who flirts with the indie rock mainstream the way he does.<br />
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But this year was special. <u>Refactory Obdurate</u> is some of his best work ever, and after a career like his, that's saying something. It's his probably his heaviest and darkest album - we haven't heard guitars roar like this since Secret South, and both 'Salome' and 'Obdurate Obscura' are haunting even compared to his back catalog. It's also his most hook-filled and accessible, probably. These are some catchy tunes. Terrifying, sure, but eminently hummable. The rhythm section gives the songs a punch they lacked on his earlier albums, and Edward's voice has only grown in power of the years -- here he whispers, sings, and barks like Michael Jira. Every track here is at least very, very good, from the straightforward 'My Good Shepherd'* to the atmospheric 'El-Bow' to the metal riffs of 'Hiss'. And the best tracks - 'Salome,' 'Obdurate Obscura', 'Corsicana Clip' - are transcendent.<br />
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I should have perhaps posted this earlier, in advent, because to me this is advent music. It's full of eschatological dread and hope, not unlike the words of Jesus himself. If you can follow half of the biblical allusions - to martyrdom ('only one man stood up for Stephen'), the crucifixion ('if you release this man, you are no friend to caesar') - you can get an event better sense of the depth here. This is a sinister, beautiful, sacred album. <br />
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And so it beats out a lot of other great music from other great musicians (Swans, Agalloch, At the Gates, Pallbearer, and many more) to make it the best album of the year, in my estimation.<br />
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http://deathwishinc.bandcamp.com/album/refractory-obdurate<br />
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*(which would be a Christian radio hit in a just world, but alas, the sun shines on the talented and the talentless alike)Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-45428022307641203392014-10-20T06:20:00.001-07:002014-10-20T06:20:13.076-07:00Jack Aubrey Reviews Indie Rock Songs<div class="mail-message expanded" id="m4229" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
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"The Mariners Revenge Song" by the Demberists.<br /></div>
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JA: I don't know who these decemberists are but they are no seamen. Only a lubber would be caught up like that and eaten by a whale<br /></div>
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JA: Anyway, Stephen, you know more about these reptiles than I. You can't live in the belly of a whale, much less murder a man for acting the scrub to your mother, can you?<br /></div>
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SM: Jesus Mary and Joseph! They're not reptiles, Jack.<br /></div>
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JA: They're cold and slimy. Surely that is a reptile, Stephen.<br /></div>
SM: -fumes- -Plays a bit on his cello-<br /></div>
JA: (worried) Well you can't live inside a whale's stomach, can you, Stephen?<br /></div>
SM: -Sighs- I should think not. They are more like bags then caves, really. So one could not murder any scrubs whilst inside of one. And all the specimens that I am aware of have throats far too narrow to swallow a man whole.<br /></div>
JA: There was the Jonah, though. The first Jonah Cove, with the rum run of luck. What about him?<br /></div>
SM: It stands to reason, then, that that was a miraculous whale, with a capacious gullet and a voluminous gut.<br /></div>
JA: Well then, I suppose that settles it. No seamen, and ignorant of whales as well. Shall we play the Boccharini?</div>
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"Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" by the Mountain Goats<br /></div>
JA: This...Darnielle fellow seems like a bit of a scrub, doesn't he? I mean, if a woman should, well, you know, undo one's breeches and...in a privy. Well one should at least thank the lady for her kindness, and not write a song about it.<br /></div>
SM: You are the soul of gallantry, Jack.<br /></div>
JA: I don't see what's so diverting. I just think that a gentlemen aughtn't tell the world of such things, let alone insult the lady by telling everyone he was thinking of another woman. It is very badly done, Steven. What's Marduk, anyway?<br /></div>
SM: The god of Babylon, I believe.<br /></div>
JA: Awfully odd thing to have embroidered on your chemise, ain't it?<br /></div>
SM: There is no accounting for the fashions of the young.<br /></div>
JA: Well, I'm still plenty young, and I don't understand it.<br /></div>
SM:...<br /></div>
JA: Oh come now, Steven, don't say I'm old. Any more than the dear Surprise herself!<br /></div>
SM: -mutters- in your current state you more resemble the horrible old leopard, down to the unsound knees<br /></div>
JA: Eh? I didn't hear that.<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: 13.6753244400024px;">SM: I said you are still in your prime.</span></div>
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Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-38035154116649120862014-10-13T10:19:00.002-07:002014-10-13T10:50:10.744-07:00Metal Monday Double HeaderWe have a double-header for today's metal Monday.<br />
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First up is the latest from A Pregnant Light, a one man metal/<something>core/indie band out of Grand Rapids, MI. It's probably inevitable that a guy who describes his own music as 'Purple Metal' releases a single called "Purple Pain." It's a testament to how good this is that I'm not disappointed that it's not a tremelo-picked and screamed tribute to Prince.<br />
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The songs here are nothing really new for 'Deathless Marantha', but when you have one of the most unique sounds in loud music today, that's not so bad. It's more hook-heavy, emotionally raw and generally rocking material that mashes up metal rifts, hardcore-esque vocals and some lovely post-punk guitars.<br />
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http://colloquialsoundrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/purple-pain-b-w-ultraviolet<br /><br />Since today's theme is apparently emotionally gripping material from one-man bands the next song is from Dawnbringer. Even their last album was pretty deeply felt; it is probably the most emotionally gripping concept album about murdering a Urizenesque solar deity. But these songs from their latest are stripped down and powerful, like some alternate universe Jason Molina that still played heavy metal. It's great stuff.<br />
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http://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/night-of-the-hammerWilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-39165879058684931192014-09-14T08:50:00.002-07:002014-09-14T08:50:30.774-07:00May Her Memory be a Blessing, Part II<span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:0"></span><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">To follow up on my previous, I went to Mrs. Maschler's memorial service this morning. I
heard from her former colleagues and students and her daughters. And
everyone speaking worked together to paint a picture of her. She was a
woman who was incredibly blunt, and also incredibly interested in
everyone she talked to. When you talked to her, she really listened.
And when she told you that you were wrong and told you why (quite
forcefully!) she did so not because she delighted in putting you in your
place, but because she really took what you had to say seriously. She
took -you- seriously. And she would hold up your words to the same
(merciless) scrutiny that she applied to Sts Augustine and Paul or Kant.
You were in the same boat as they were. You were not just some kid,
you and your words mattered to her.</span><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$1:0" /><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$3:0" /><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$4:0">And
because you mattered to her, your life mattered to her, and she would
worry over it. She always thought I was not living up to my
intellectual potential, working the job I did. But she said that
because she really did care about me. And so it was, apparently, with
everyone she knew.</span><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$5:0" /><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$7:0" /><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$8:0">I
value kindness a lot. Which might be funny or hypocritical coming from
me, I don't know. And I generally take little stock in people that are
blunt or abrupt because they are 'being honest'. But from her, telling
you that you were -wrong- sir, that was a kindness. It was a mark of
respect. I will never forget that.</span><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$9:0" /><br data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$11:0" /><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$12:0">May her memory be blessed.</span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$12:0"><br /><br />And if I may be abstract, I think my experience with Chaininah is instructive. All my life I was told I was smart and special and was awarded parts on the back for doing as well as could be expected for someone of my years. Chaininah was a rare person who did not hold me to some kind of weighted 'pretty smart for a punk kid' standard, but held me to the same standard that she held the great minds of history. And perhaps that's what we need more of in our teachers and our education -- an attempt to take students seriously, to ask them to really put their minds out there and hold themselves up to no less standard than finding the truth.</span></span></span><span data-reactid=".jr.1:3:1:$comment803046416414585_824456594273567:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.4"></span>Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-74907829211842836432014-09-14T08:32:00.003-07:002014-09-14T08:32:32.363-07:00May Her Memory be a BlessingA friend of mine (St John's tutor from way back whom I used to drive
around town) died in August. I was never that close to her, and her death
makes me sad in that general 'I will miss you' kind of way that I feel
when non-close friends or non-immediate relatives die. Since my parents
are still alive and all my closest friends are still with us, this is
all I've known of death - missing people.<br />
Mostly I suppose I wanted to share a bit about her. Chaninah <span class="highlightNode">Maschler</span> was born in the<span class="text_exposed_show"> Berlin in 1931 but grew up in the Netherlands. She was Jewish. The first thing I heard her say about the war was 'I didn't go
outside much', then she had been hiding with a gentile family in Utrecht, that her brother had run messages for the resistance, and
that she'd survived the hunger winter of 1944-1945. I later learned that her Mother had survived Bergen-Belsen, and her brother had not.<br /></span><br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
She was a philosopher to the bone. Sharp like Wittgenstein or Pascal,
not jovial like Hume. She was a Pierce scholar (and general fan of
pragmatism) who studied at Princeton and had ended up at St John's
because she was friends with a faculty member there, I think it was Eva
Brann. Knew Rorty a bit, I am not sure how well. That's to say she had
a mind like a trap, and I could only just keep up.<br />
She married
an artist and art dealer who (as far as I can tell) had never gone past
high school, and as far as I can tell she was happy with him until he
died a couple of years before I met her. She had two twin daughters.<br /><br />
I last saw her two months before she died, trying and failing to solve printer
problems for her. My biggest regret is that I saw her less than I ought
to have when she had cancer. My last memory of her was that she was
much the same as ever, but weaker and more tired. I am glad I have
that.</div>
Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-35735191199712446162014-08-17T10:49:00.002-07:002014-08-17T10:49:33.667-07:00A Note on the Police<div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">
With Ferguson going on, a lot of people have said a lot about the cops lately. About the
militarization of the American Police and the need for journalists and
ordinary citizens to monitor the actions of the police.<br /><br />
When this
sort of thing comes up, it is customary for someone to point out that
there are a lot of good cops out there (most cops are good, nearly all
cops are good, only a few of the apples are bad). This may be true.
But it is beside the point.<br /><br />
Our republic is not built on the idea
of trusting the good intentions and good judgment of those with power.
It is built on constraining those in power, constraining them with the
law. We subject them to the law and we subject them to the scrutiny
needed to make sure that they abide by the law. Or at least, that is
what we must do if we're going to keep up this whole liberal democracy
thing going. <br /><br />
If cops were angels, we would need no rights.</div>
Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-77325047967193907902013-10-22T10:47:00.001-07:002013-10-22T10:47:21.892-07:00Macroeconomics for DragonsA conservative relative posted something on Facebook about the Federal Reserve recently. It said that you could understand the Federal reserve by consulting the monopoly rulebook, roughly:<br />
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'Q:What happens when the bank runs out of money?'<br />
A: The bank cannot run out of money. If bills run out the banker will write amounts on pieces of paper and use these as money.'<br />
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Actually this is a pretty wonderfuly explanation of what the federal reserve does and why it's important: it makes sure that we have money so that we can play the game, IE buy and sell things. It would be a miserable game of monopoly indeed if money could just run out, and in the real world the results are worse -- the Great Depression is a fabulous example.<br />
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But of course, my family member did not intend the above as a compliment to Ben Bernanke's efforts to inject more money into the economy. And it makes me wonder -- what do you have to believe for this all to be a -bad- thing? What do you have to believe to think that it's wrong to make sure that there is enough money in the economy?<br />
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In brief, you must believe that money is real and definite and solid. Not a tool that we use to keep track of things and to exchange, a means to an end, but a thing as real as the things you buy with money. A thing that must have a definite and concrete value. This is why gold is important to these people -- it makes money into something definite (never mind that bullion based currencies have their own instabilities). Hard-money fetishists will talk and talk about hyperinflation and its dangers, but their belief in hyperinflation is a consequence, not a cause, of their ideology. The cause is that they cannot accept that money is merely an instrument.<br />
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They will argue that all inflation is immoral, because it violates the sanctity of money. One could ask (more plausibly) -- isn't deflation immoral because it reduces the value of real things? But that's the rub -- money is more important than the things it can buy and the things it can do. This is an ideology for horders, an ideology that has made covetousness into a virtue. If Smaug the Golden were to postulate an economic theory, I'm sure he and Rand Paul would large be in agreement.<br />
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Seen this way, hard-money ideology is a perversion, an effort to raise a human-created tool above the real things that it allows us to buy and sell. It is an idol, and it is our duty to smash it. Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-79891645489158003842013-10-07T06:46:00.000-07:002013-10-07T06:46:03.879-07:00You Should Take Responsibility So I Don't Have ToWhenever someone says 'personal responsibility' my eyes glaze over. I've heard it said too much, and heard it say too little.<br /><br />This phrase has become a magical incantation. A spell people use to ward off the boogeymen -- moral relativism, people blaming society for their problems, the decline in American values. Of course, these are boogeymen, not real problems but the invented crises of moral busybodies and superstitious fanatics who are concern-trolling our nation (I'm looking at you, Douthat). The idea that invoking 'personal responsibility' does anything is laughable - young men do not turn to the corner because some NPR liberal said it wasn't their fault, and telling them that it's their fault is not going to make them stop.<br /><br />But as laughable as it is, it is invoked again and again can be deployed against drug users, teen moms, teens that aren't moms, poor people on welfare, poor people not on welfare, black folks and many others. And that's the sinister part.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />This is because beyond being a magic charm that is wielded against imaginary demons, it is a very real and very harmful thought. The thought that anyone out there who suffers just needs to 'take responsibility.' It can be used against anyone who is in dire straits. Just recently I was reading an ESPN article on my lunch break. Ed Reed (a man who has brain damage from playing football) called the NFL 'Shady' for hiding evidence that repeated concussions in football could cause generative neurological disease. He did not say that the NFL was at fault for his own medical problems (though he could have). In fact before he has said that <a href="http://sn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/super-bowl-media-day-ed-reed-says-junior-seau-signed-up-dangers-of-football-says-he-feels-effects-of-concussions-012913">he and other plays got what they signed up for</a> (perhaps the depths of the cover-up are making him rethink this). But despite the fact that Reed said nothing about his own health, commenters on the article accused him of trying to avoid responsibility for his myriad health problems. I bring this up because this is a naked example of the true use of 'personal responsibility' - as a way of saying that we have no need to feel compassion for other human beings.<br /><br />Ed Reed made no claims for himself, he merely said something that was true -- it is shady when the NFL covers up medical facts. People are not invoking 'personal responsibility' to say that Ed Reed is responsible for his choices, but to de-legitimize his criticism of the NFL. More broadly, I think people want to de-legitimize the idea that we are bound to have empathy for Reed or Seau or Duerson. It is a defense mechanism - by telling other people to take responsibility we duck our own.<br /><br />And this applies to so many things. After all, if 'personal responsibility' applies to every situation, then people are on their own and I have no moral duty to any of them. I only need to look after myself.<br /><br />And there's the rub. Under the guise of American Values and common decency, the casual invocation of 'personal responsibility' is an attack on the very idea of people having an ethical obligation to one another. It is not an example of American individualism, but a flagrant attack on the very idea of society*. It is the rankest sort of nihilism, and it has spread through our discourse like a cancer.<br /><br />*and, I might add, an attack on the very heart of Christian ethics<br />Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-11539047856083054032013-08-31T05:59:00.004-07:002013-08-31T06:51:33.246-07:00Pride and CrueltyThe word 'cruelty' is often used as though it is synonymous with 'sadism.' As though the only cruel people in the world were those who drowned cats for fun when they were kids and then graduated to doing even worse to their fellow human beings as adults. The word cruel conjures up, for me, the lurid proceedings of police dramas (<u>Luther</u> is pretty good, but man, it's uncomfortable sometimes) and true crime stories; it's a word for serial killers and the psychopathic enforcers of drug gangs. Certainly it seems to imply that someone is getting pleasure from someone's pain and death.<br />
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But people can derive pleasure from the pain and the death of another without deriving pleasure from pain and death as such. And looking at myself and those around me and people throughout recorded history, I think that cruelty is often not the enjoyment of -anyone's- pain, but the enjoyment of a specific person's pain. We acknowledge as much when we look at things like the torturous murders James Byrd or Matthew Shepherd or Emmit Till. Hate can make people enjoy the pain of those they despise or fear or envy.<br />
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But that's not all. I think even more often cruelty is enabled only by people's ability to justify it, to convince themselves that another person deserves to suffer. But more than this I don't think it's merely 'enabled' by justification, but -created- by our judgment that someone else is worthy of being punished. We see someone as being 'bad,' and we want to see them suffer. I think we should take seriously the idea that lynch mobs felt fully justified in mutilating and murdering black men and boys not just out of simple race hatred but out of a (racist) feeling that their victims deserved it. People do not see themselves as cruel boys ripping the wings off flies, but as avenging angels, damning the wicked. Looking at our prisons today, how many horrors are met with a collective shrug and the sentiment 'they deserve it.' Indeed, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann">Cameron Todd Willingham</a> was almost certainly innocent of killing his family because -there was no arson at all- and people still say 'he was a bad guy who got what he deserved.'<br />
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<br />
And of course cruelty can simply be an unfeeling willingness to leave others to their fate. When society washes it's hands of the fate of the poor on the premise that 'they had their chance and blew it', that is cruel. It is cruelty by inaction.<br />
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Speaking socially and historically, cruelty of this sort is the way that society shows its contempt for underclasses and untouchable castes and keeps them in their place. It is the way that people enforce the social order.<br />
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Speaking personally and theologically, cruelty of this sort is the natural outgrowth of pride. It is our arrogance and self-satisfaction that allows us to consign other people to suffering. Within the Christian tradition, a rejection of pride necessitates a rejection of judgement -- that is why the Sermon on the Mount includes the injunction to 'judge not.' And this also necessitates a rejection of cruelty and its justifications, not merely the active cruelty of lynch mobs and the prison system, but the passive cruelty of letting people go without medical care, or a decent shot in life, or education. At least that's how I see it.<br />
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For myself, I am a naturally cruel person, prone to judgment and a self-satisfied delight in 'punishing' people. Often nothing more than my dislike of fuss holds me tongue and prevents me from lighting into people. Perhaps posts like this are a way of reminding myself to be better. <br />
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<br />Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-92100194564538510692013-08-29T05:05:00.000-07:002013-08-31T05:10:41.379-07:00Dystopias are for TeenagersI recently re-read Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, <u>Life and Fate</u>, which is about the Great Patriotic war and the respective horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, and about the effect that those authoritarian regimes had on all they touchedt. It is a great novel, a self-conscious 20th century answer to <u>War and Peace</u> that can stand the comparison and not seem merely pretentious. I published a brief review earlier this year <br />
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Reading it confirmed in my mind something I've thought before -- that whatever it's virtues, dystopian fiction is not the best tool to help us understand what life is like under authoritarianism. If you want to find out about life under Stalin, read something by an actual Soviet, not by an English idealist who'd never set foot in the USSR.<br />
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Phrased like that, it seems obvious that reading Soviet literature is the only way to get a literary picture of Stalinism, but it is remarkable how many people have told me that 1984 is some glimpse into the essence of 'totalitarianism.*' It's been long enough since I actually entertained this notion that I have a hard time giving it a serious airing. I suppose one could say that it describes the effects of authoritarianism in a generalized form, abstracted from the specifics of the real world or the individuality of the characters. Certainly it shows the self-censorship, mental as well as verbal, that affects people who are unfree (a subtler description of this process can be found in most Soviet dissident novels). It also shows the paranoia, the constant sense of attack, and the manipulation of history, and it shows them powerfully.<br />
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This argument neglects the fact that 1984, and all dystopias, present a deliberately caricatured view of society and individuals, a world where government control is total and individuality is nearly extinguished. This is not the reality of life under Stalin -- people had personalities, personal lives, families, even as the Party and State wormed their way into all of these. They had lives. They sold and bought things on the black market and got by. They had private conversations, some of which were reported and got them sent to the camps. In short, they did not resemble the empty husks of the party members that Orwell portrays, let alone his patronizing (indeed, in hindsight outright offensive) portrayal of earthy 'proles' that were indifferent to politics. I sometimes think that Americans read 1984, and assume that the Chinese or the Soviets really had had their humanity erased. Moreover the distortions of an intrusive state are most instructive when we see them acting on an actual human being, not on an abstraction.<br />
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So what good are dystopias? To put it blithely, dystopias are for teenagers. They are abstracted, grandiose and dramatic, which appeals to younger people's love of big ideas and dramatic settings. Because their characters are archetypal rather than fully fleshed out, there's no need to have lived enough of a life to understand them. And in a classroom setting, dystopias are a good way to get young people talking about abstract questions like individual liberty versus the needs of the whole. But as I've said before, a grown-up intellectual life cannot live on abstractions. I worry that too many people never grow out of their love of Big Ideas and graduate to a world that is painted in shades of gray.<br />
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*A word that, in as much as it has meaning, seems based on a misconception, and is certainly applied too broadly -- Nazi germany was in no way a 'Totalitarian' state, but a murderous one. It was a state whose murders were, unlike those of the Stalinist USSR, mostly directed outwards. <br />
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<br />Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-33636223999329091752013-08-27T06:26:00.000-07:002013-08-27T06:26:36.126-07:00Corporate Social Responsibility Doesn't Exist, Which is Why Government Regulation Should<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-my-boss-is-all-wrong-when-he-says-companies-should-pay-workers-more-2013-8">This </a>is a good summary of the problems of worker pay, wage stagnation and corporate versus societal responsibility. It pretty much sums up my feelings on corporate America, which I'd like to expand.<br />
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Beginning in with Henry Ford and continuing through the New Deal and the 50's and 60's America has had a deal with its corporations. We'd let them do what they wanted and they'd take care of their workers -- Unions would become domesticated, and even non-union workers would get nearly union-like benefits and tenure. We built healthcare around employment, we built retirement around employment, all assuming that a) people would continue working at the Ford plant for their entire lives and b) a private equity firm would not buy the Ford plant for pennies and sell it for scrap.<br />
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This grand bargain between corporate America and the public was always a bum deal -- it gave us Love Canal, among other things. But we were happy with it as long as companies held up their end of the bargain -- fairly stable employment, good benefits, high wages.<br />
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Then in the 80's the suits reneged on their half of the deal -- 'you don't really need that low deductible insurance plan, or that fixed-benefit retirment plan, do you?' And then, of course, came the real kicker 'well you know our real responsibility is to our shareholders, not to you, our employees' and then the layoffs start.<br />
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But you know what? The Corporations are right. Their job is to make money. We were the fools for ever thinking differently. It's not so simple, of course. Wall Street types will lay people off til the cows come home and then scream 'job creators' whenever you request that, since they've been making out like bandits, they give back more to the common pot. So when that happens we just need to take what they say about profits and shareholder value and run with it. They won't take care of people and they won't take care of the planet, so it's our job to do it for them (on their dime). They will take as much as they can. Our job is to stop them. This is the way it is. We are free of illusions, at least.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-83434103221474825342013-08-27T06:18:00.001-07:002013-08-27T06:18:49.194-07:00A note on ethics, why-do-I-bother editionI should not comment on anything that Ross Douthat ever writes. It's not a good practice to grant page views to misogynists with delusions of Thomistic philosophical chops. But sometimes I can't help myself, because Douthat is typical of a sort of intellectual* conservative that dresses up religious dogma and prejudice in the clothing of concern about social cohesian and mores.<br />
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I nearly found myself agreeing with Douthat <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/the-scientism-of-steven-pinker/?_r=0">on the subject of almost as odious Stephen Pinker</a>. I agree that 'science' does not dictate any moral values (is versus ought, etc). But then I thought about what Douthat had written, and I realized he was wrong (even if Pinker was as well) and that all was right with the world once again.<br />
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Douthat makes an easy point in saying that 'science' does not endorse liberal cosmopolitanism. That is true. And Pinker makes it easy for Douthat in going on and on about the use of science as though evolutionary biology would provide to key to such questions as "what is justice?" But Douthat is still wrong. What you might call the humanist ethic does not come from science but from something deeper -- skepticism and compassion. When you read Montaigne, you see a aversion to cruelty (see "On Cannibals"). But you also see a profound skepticism of tradition and dogmatism. And this leads to that aversion to cruelty, since when you do not know if Huguenots are leading people into hell, burning them at the stake is mere murder. In general, a skeptical humanism strips away extraneous moral dictates (suffer not the witch to live, kill the heretic, let not man lie with man as with a woman) just by asking 'why?' And what you are left with at the end is a concern for your fellow human beings. The above is not a moral philosophy but a moral inclination, but people
follow their moral inclinations, not their moral philosophies. This does not need to be 'proven,' since no one actually needs to 'ground' their moral beliefs -- they simply follow their inclinations. <br />
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I would go further and say that I have see no evidence that moral philosophy has made people better. I have seen no evidence that attempts to logically 'ground' morality have improved our moral thinking and abolished slavery, liberated women or allowed gays to live openly. On the other hand I see the positive results of this moral inclination every time I see a same-sex couple walking openly down the street, or see a black man walk into a store and get service. This is why there is no crisis of 'relativism' in this country or any other. People will do what they think is right, even if they don't believe it was handed down from on high. Nietzche was wrong -- morality is only a 'problem' if you think it's a problem.<br />
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Now this inclination is not 'scientific' but skeptical curiosity about the world is also at the root of science. Thus while there is no -logical- connection between the two, they are similar inclinations, and it makes sense that they have grown in strength together. Moreover this inclination has been as active -within- religion as outside of it. It is why most Jews now believe that the welfare of women is more important than following the dictates of Leviticus, why Christians no longer torture one another because they disagree over the way in which Christ is present in the Eucharist.<br />
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A more specific complaint against Douthat is that he makes a characteristic leap employed by Kantians and Catholics alike -- the assumption that all morality based on the welfare of human beings is 'utilitarianism.' This is a crude not-quite ad hominem that states that if you don't believe that morality must have an inhuman origin (the dictates of God, the logic of a universal moral law) you therefore believe in throwing babies under buses if it will make more people happy. If you believe that morality seeks the good of human beings, you are a moral humanist. This does not mean that you believe that that good is the same as 'maximal happiness' and that happiness is synonymous with the absence of pain. For myself, I think that our knowledge is limited enough that any attempt to guide our actions by 'maximum happiness' in the abstract is hubristic at best. But this does not mean that I don't think that moral acts are those that benefit other human beings and the world we live in. To me, such a humanistic morality is the natural result of the skepticism that I mention above.<br />
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As a final thought, I should say where I'm coming from. I believe that 'Moral Law' is a bad metaphor. Worse than that, I think it is oppressive and monstrous to tell people that their actions, if they are to be just, should have an object -other- than the welfare of those around them and the world that they inhabit. But that's not my philosophy, just my inclination.<br />
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*I thought of adding quotation marks, but that seemed cheap. Douthat and his ilk can indeed use their brains; whether this effort is profitably employed is another story.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-60340938170485268582013-08-18T19:33:00.001-07:002013-08-27T05:32:41.762-07:00Segregation in My American CityThere's been a bunch of maps showing the ethnic geography of America America and it's cities lately. <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2013/08/segregation_in_america_every_neighborhood_in_the_u_s_mapped_along_racial.html">This one</a> is the latest. And this makes me think about my own city, and its own history of segregation.<br />
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3 weeks ago my wife and I and I bought a mattress from a lovely local place. I got to talking with the owner about living in the historic district. Back in the 90's, like 20(!) years ago, she had lived on our old street, College Avenue, on the same block I did from 2008 to 2011. I had known that at one time the many of the houses on the street had been owned by African-Americas. I learned from her that when she lived there there were still some older people (they all sounded like retirees), mostly black, living on the block. By the time I moved in the street was nothing but white folks and vacant houses (like 3 vacant properties on my block, which isn't terrible but still kind of jarring).<br />
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Now some background. Annapolis was segregated on a house-by-house basis. I don't know if there were legal covenants or not, but during Jim Crow there were just houses that were rented to or sold to black people and other houses that were rented to or sold to white people. Thus Annapolis was segregated (and I'm sure white people screwed the black population of Annapolis out of a decent deal on houses), but on a block by block basis people were fairly mixed.<br />
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Fast forward 50 years. These days there are virtually no African Americans living in the historic district -- there's one nearby street that's still mostly black, and that's about it within walking distance of downtown. Even in the historically black suburb/neighborhood of Eastport, much of the African American community now only lives in the cheaper housing stock from the 60's on the edges of the neighborhood. Mostly the black population of Annapolis lives in apartments (including some housing projects manged by a tight-fisted and tyrannical private contractor) and houses far from the city center, in neighborhoods that are quite homogenous.<br />
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This is part of a larger shift in Annapolis. Back in the day, Annapolis was a working town for waterman and boat-builders. I feel like the conventional image of the Chesapeake waterman is probably a white guy (probably by analogy to New England) but a disproportionate amount of crabbing and oyster-harvesting was done by African Americans, from the antebellum era to the collapse of the fisheries from the 50's through the 70's. So while before Annapolis had a very vibrant and pretty diverse population of working people and small business owners (including a big Greek-American community), since the 70's it's become a playground for rich people and their boats, and a place for wealthy retirees to find 'peace and quiet.' And so the sons and daughters of crabbers and oystermen and small business owners have either left for greener pastures (the DC suburbs, Baltimore county) or they've taken up marginal jobs and moved into marginal housing. The death of the bay was, for cities like this one, what closing factories were for many other towns.<br />
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This is a long way of saying this -- Annapolis is now more segregated, in terms of housing, than it was during Jim Crow. It's a grim thought.<br />
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NB: there's a book on my reading list called 'the Other Annapolis' about the history of the African American community of Annapolis, from the founding to the present.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-70762575650700717822013-08-16T11:08:00.002-07:002013-08-16T11:08:09.013-07:00A Waistcoat Manifesto Pt 1Waistcoats* have been in and out of fashion a number of times since they were first discarded in the 1940's (much like hats). They have been brought back as a novelty, and then discarded again when the tides of fashion turn. Me, however, I am a waistcoat-wearing man. If I'm waring a tie I feel naked without one. I'll wear them whether or not they're in fashion, partly because I think following your personal sense of style is always fashionable, partly because I can't imagine doing anything else.<br />
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Being the sort of person who overthinks things, I have given a lot of thought about waistcoats. Why they are an important part of a fully dressed man's wardrobe, and how they can best be incorporated into an ensemble.<br />
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First, why wear a waistcoat? The answer if fairly simple -- it just helps to have a layer between your coat and your shirt and tie. The reason for this is that the shirt is, on it's own, an unshapely and drab garment, not intended to see too much of the light of day. It helps to have something other than a jacket to cover the shirt and add interest to the outfit This is the core logic of the waistcoat, and it can be broken down into several points:<br />
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<li>Waistcoats hide the shirt. Shirts are boring, and they should be boring. Too bold patterns in a shirt will unbalance an outfit by drawing the attention to the inner layer, rather than the outer layers. Likewise too vibrant or too dark colors are not a good idea for shirts -- the Regis Philbin look is an excellent illustration of this point. Thus a good shirt is a blank canvas, and it is dull and monotonous if too much of this shows -- particlarly when the coat is unbuttoned, or taken off. This calls for covering it with something that can have a more interesting color, fabric and cut. This helps especially when the jacket is unbuttoned or when a jacket is taken off, or when a bowtie is worn.**</li>
<li>Waistcoats both secure and hide the tie. When a coat is unbuttoned ties tend to dangle and flap awkwardly. Witness our President in this photo:<a href="http://www.anchorties.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Obama-in-the-wind.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="http://www.anchorties.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Obama-in-the-wind.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />Even with a tie clip or pin, there's still this long, pendulous strip of cloth just hanging down there. It needs to be -covered- as well as fastened down.</li>
<li>Waistcoats shape the figure. Shirts, even tailored shirts, are not form-fitting garments. Their cut and material makes them unsuited to the task. A waistcoat, by contrast, is a form of mild waist-suppression that can subtly de-emphasize the waist and highlight the shoulders instead. This is particularly important when a man removes his jacket.</li>
<li>They can mix things up. A 3-piece suit restricts wearers to wearing a vest that matches the pants and jacket, but that's hardly the only way to wear a waistcoat. A contrasting waistcoat, particularly one in between the shades of the shirt and jacket, can add a nice bit of 'texture' to an outfit. </li>
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This sums up the 'why' of waring waistcoats. In part 2 I will discuss the 'how.'<br />
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*I use the British term to differentiate the waistcoat from other, less formal, types of vest.<br />
**In the old days a man was undressed without his jacket, but that was because his shirt was his underwear. With the introduction of T-shirt undershirts and deoderant, there's no -hygenic- reason why men can't go around in their shirtsleeves.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-79984462404142101292013-07-14T06:41:00.001-07:002013-07-14T06:41:56.497-07:00What it means that doubts about Zimmerman's guilt are 'reasonable'Like a lot of people I'm sad, angry and not entirely surprised about the verdict in the slaying of Trayvon Martin. It strikes me as a basic injustice, not on the legal level, but the human one, because George Zimmerman is the reason that Trayvon Martin is dead. George Zimmerman followed him. George Zimmerman confronted him. George Zimmerman brought deadly force with him. And it was George Zimmerman who, when it came to blows, pulled the trigger.<br />
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Beyond that I'm disgusted by the tactics of the defense, which resemble nothing so much as a defense attorney in a rape case convincing a male jury that the victim was a lying slut who asked for it.<br />
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But on a legal level I'm disturbed by what a jury* found 'reasonable.' I'm disturbed that they thought it was 'reasonable' to assume, even as a possibility, the best of George Zimmerman and the worst of Trayvon Martin. Because that says a lot about who we trust (and this is what a lot of these verdicts come down to, whether or not juries trust someone even a little bit). That jury, and thus our nation as a legal entity, has decided to simply trust George Zimmerman, and to think it 'reasonable' that Trayvon Martin died because of his own suicidal bravado and aggression. That we would think such a thing reasonable is disgusting.<br />
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*Who seem to have been of Zimmerman's peers, not Martin's.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-47676496023661164872013-05-27T15:47:00.000-07:002013-05-27T15:47:57.470-07:00Industrial Decline as a Red HerringDavid Simon had another rant quoted in the Guardian. It was mostly true -- the war on drugs as a war on black people -- but it reminded me of something that rings false in Simon and many others on the contemporary left- their bemoaning of America's industrial decline.<br />
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This is not just a left-wing phenomenon. It is found across the political spectrum -- people generally agree that American manufacturing has declined (which is true, in employment terms) and that this is the cause of the problems of the American working class.<br />
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I would dispute the last part of this conventional wisdom. To start with, there is no necessary connection between highly paid, lower-skilled jobs and the manufacturing sector. Indeed, the manufacturing jobs that remain in this country mostly either require advanced technical degrees, or pay somewhere in the vicinity of $10 an hour. Working in a factory does not magically transform the working class into the middle class, and shuttering factories does not magically transform them into the working poor.<br />
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No, the reason why factory jobs used to be so good was because of the strength of American labor, and because we were a society that had decided that working people should be able to live the American dream, even if they're not anesthesiologists. The problem is not the sort of labor that Americans are doing, but our nation's devaluation of labor in general*. The services industry is, unlike manufacturing, extremely resistant to offshoring (we need people to work in our stores, in America) -- the problem is that we have decided that it's fine that our legions of restaurant and retail employees make $8 an hour. Wringing out hands about the decline of factories does nothing to help the million or so Americans working at Wal Marts across the nation. The factories are not coming back (at least not in their previous, labor-intensive, form) but there is plenty we could do to help the American working class, by getting serious about the workers of the service industry.<br /><br /><br />*Perhaps our romanticization of blue-collar works only helps to devalue pink-collar work, as we act as though pink-collar jobs are intrinsically not valuable, unlike those begone heroes at the Ford plant.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-9580566551328809842013-05-16T20:03:00.002-07:002013-05-16T20:18:19.361-07:00Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman - Initial ThoughtsFor the past several weeks, I've been re-reading Vasily Grossman's <u>Life and Fate</u>. The shortest review I could give is that you should read it, it's brilliant and beautiful and brings alive a world that most people in the West can only imagine. It is a masterpiece.<br />
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But if you want to hear something more, you can find my thoughts below.<br />
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I'll start by saying that <u>Life and Fate</u> is sprawling and rambling even by the standards of a Russian novel. There are two ways in which it sprawls -- its vast array of characters and plot threads, and its many philosophical and lyrical digressions. Both of these could be seen as flaws, but in fact both are integral to the novel's unique power.<br />
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First, Life and Fate has a lot of characters (who each have 3 names), which is kind of a given with a Russian novel, but it has more than most and the point of view is more evenly shared between them than it is in say, <u>War and Peace</u> (which <u>Life and Fate</u> is to some extent modeled on). Making a wild guess, the closest thing we have to a main protagonist (Viktor Sturm) appears in at most of a third of the chapters. Also, the threads connecting the characters are more in the past than they are present in the novel itself -- they have a shared history, but they are separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles, and the events of the novel bridge this gap only thematically (part of this may be because the novel is a sequel to <u>For a Just Cause</u>, Grossman's previous, more conventionally pro-Soviet novel). This means that we do not get to know most of the characters well enough to see them develop -- Viktor Sturm and Commisar Krymov are among a handful that seem to grow as the novel progresses.<br />
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But the sheer number of characters and their various backgrounds actually points to one of the novel's greatest strengths. This is the most historical novel I have ever read. I do not mean that its history is well-researched. I mean that the novel is itself a work of history, a depiction of an entire society at a certain time. In this context it makes sense that most characters do not change that much -- this is more of a portrait than a narrative, and it is a brilliant and life-like portrait at that. We meet old revolutionaries who are unable to confront the consequences of their ideals, we meet not-quite dissident intellectuals, we meet cold-blooded Stalinist functionaries, we meet generals and the common frontoviki, the whole of Soviet society. We see how all bear the burden of unfreedom, and how it distorts the lives of all in varied ways. Tellingly, we meet few true dissidents, even in the Gulags -- the USSR is a nation where vague discontent and doubt has replaced overt critique. We do meet many true believers, including those who continue to believe even in the Gulag. We see how for some old revolutionaries the entire USSR is a kind of sunk cost, a misguided project that they have put too much work into to admit that the results of their labors is monstrous. Chillingly, we meet Stalinist functionaries for whom doubt is as alien as pity. And we meet your average Soviet, in his various guises -- someone who knows that 'excesses' occurred in 1937 and that collectivization killed all too many, but who cannot let him(her)self admit the full truth. When people speak out, it is in furtive outbursts, instantly regretted.<br />
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Moreover we meet the men and women, Russians, Ukraineans, Kalmyks, Germans and Jews - we see how the Great Patriotic war was not a Russian story, but a story for every people of the Soviet Union, many of which were erased from memory even as the war was raging. Life and Fate reclaims their story.<br />
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We also meet the dead. We meet Jews on the way to the gas chamber, doomed Red Army soldiers in a particularly famous house in Stalingrad, we meet men murdered in the Gulag and Jews about to be shot by the Einsatzgrupen. Two of the most striking passages in the novel are from the point of view of Jews who are about to be murdered. The first is a letter written by Viktor Sturm's mother to her son. Viktor is based on Grossman, and his mother is based on Grossman's own mother, who was shot outside Berdichev in 1941. In this letter Grossman is giving his own dead mother her voice back, allowing her to write a letter to himself that she never got to send. The next is an extended series of chapters from the perspective of different 'passengers' on a cattle car headed for the gas chamber (we will follow them all the way in), talking about their lives before the war, and everything else they are leaving behind forever Passages like these make the novel seem like a loving, obsessive memorial to those millions whose selves, bodies and names were immolated by Hitler and Stalin. Grossman gives them back their names and their stories with his book.<br />
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The second way in which the novel sprawls is in its innumerable digressions. Like Tolstoy, Grossman is not content to let his characters and plot do the talking, but interjects essays and encomiums and tirades into the pages of his book. But these asides wild and passionate, and this is their saving grace. Where Tolstoy's lectures on the nature of History in <u>War and Peace</u> are often delivered in an infuriatingly professorial, authoritative style, Grossman's asides are conversational, and very personal. I said above that Grossman's characters often rebel against the constraints of Stalinism with mad, brief outbursts. Grossman's rants are like an extended outburst, as though he is unburdening himself of everything he could not say or even think for 20 years and more. His love-songs to freedom and individuality are not just paens to an ideal, they are Grossman's testimony to his own liberation. They are priceless tributes to freedom indeed.<br />
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So this book is a beast, even, at times, an ungainly beast. But it is well worth your time. There is nothing else like it.<br />
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<br />Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-60486359588264793762013-05-12T15:27:00.004-07:002013-05-12T15:27:57.374-07:00'Revolution' as magical thinkingThe revolutionary extremism of the Right has been on display lately. First there was the news that <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/armed-revolution-44-republicans-article-1.1332621">44%</a>
of Republicans believe that an armed revolution may soon be necessary
to protect freedom. Then the NRA's national conference and its new
president showed the organization's commitment to de-legimitizing
elected officials and chattering about the importance of the second
amendment for maintaining that last, violent option to defend liberty.<br />
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I know some conservatives (namely my brother) who talk like this. They say it casually, flippantly. They mention no plans and no lines in the sand. Thus I
think the good news in all of this is that few people are really
serious about wanting to take their guns and seize some federal
buildings -- they are not actually turning the NRA into a massive
revolutionary militia, they're not drawing up lists of targets or
planning on disputing elections by force. They talk about it like it'll be a simple matter of saying 'I revolt' and that it will not require them to start lining up and shooting Nancy Pelosi's staffers, or sending the executive boards of the Sierra Club and NAACP to some camp*. They're just talking, and talking
like idiots.<br />
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This isn't a surprise. The only revolutionary movements that have seriously threatened the US government are the Southern White Supremacist movements that arose in defence of slavery before the civil war, and during Reconstruction in opposition to the political rights of African Americans. We Americans, despite our tumultuous founding and perhaps -because- of our tumultuous politics, are not prone to revolutions, particularly compared with Russians or Germans or the French. (One might point out more generally that established liberal democracies in general are rarely threatened by revolution -- revolutions occur in autocracies or in young republics).<br />
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But if revolution isn't a plan of action, if talking about it does not mean that one is serious about overthrowing the elected government and installing one that you agree with through force of arms, what is it?<br />
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I think the answer is easy. Revolution is magical thinking. It's a talismanic word that stands for the wiping away of everything you don't like in the world and its replacement with all that you think is just and good. In its current use it is merely a talisman, merely a wistful thought of a 'better' world where politics is simple because everyone you disagree with has disappeared. It is a childish tantrum against the hard realities that everything doesn't always go your way.<br />
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Now just because something is childish doesn't make it harmless. Even if today's conservative revolutionaries don't draw up plans to sieze government buildings or formulate lists of Unitarian ministers, librarians and trade unionists to be deported to, I dunno, northern Michigan, even then there is a danger. Because talk of revolution de-legitimizes our elected government, and the general griping can provide cover for those who have more serious plans (as was the case in the 1990's, when general right-wing craziness hid in its midst McVeigh, Rudolf and others).<br />
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In the longer term there is the risk that people will believe their own bullshit, that the perfect dream of a world where no one disagrees with them will be too good to ignore, and words will become actions. Such a thing is always a risk, even it if is, today, a long way off.<br />
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*People are generally ignorant of what 'revolution' means -- generally finding the people you disagree with and shooting them in the head before they can do the same to you. It's not a state of affairs I'd wish for.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-37561780122093817202013-04-26T08:12:00.001-07:002013-04-26T08:13:52.237-07:00The Uniquely awful presidency of George W BushGeorge W. Bush is back in the news with the opening of his presidential library (when did these become a thing, anyway?). There have been some weak attempts to defend him, and more repetitions of what we already know -- that George W. Bush was a poor president that made bad decisions, a man so obsessed with being 'the decider' that he banished any of the doubt and self-reflection needed for serious decision making*.<br />
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I've been returning to something that the great, curmudgeonly historian David Foner said -- that George W. Bush was the worst president ever. Now I didn't think that then and I don't think that now -- we've had more wicked presidents (Jackson) and presidents that have presided over (and helped create) greater national disasters (Hoover, Buchanan).<br />
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But there is a narrow sense in which I think Bush is 'the worst ever' -- never before has a president -created- so many problems without any need or excuse. Never before has a president been given such a strong hand -- a budget surplus, international leadership both moral and political -- and squandered it so completely, leaving us with financial collapse, trillion-dollar deficits, a misbegotten and mismanaged war, and Abu Ghraib. The other presidential failures -- Hoover and Buchanan come to mind -- were given great challenges and failed spectacularly. George W. Bush was given one significant but manageable challenge - 9-11 - and failed badly, and then he conjured up more failures (deficits, Katrina's aftermath) from thin air and sheer incompetence.<br />
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I've studied a bit of American history, and I think this is unique. Other presidents (Nixon, Jefferson) mixed unforced errors with brilliant accomplishments, while others (Adams) had brilliant accomplishments amidst general incompetence. George W. Bush doesn't just belong aside Harding and Filmore amongst the mediocre presidents, he belongs at the bottom of them all, circling the drain with Buchanan and Hoover.<br />
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*This probably has a bit to do with his MBA education and his stints in the corporate world, honestly.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-85584553100913660512013-04-14T12:23:00.002-07:002013-04-15T11:12:53.542-07:00'Collectivism' and 'Statism' are useless wordsAs the last two posts from me indicate, I've been reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Nazi and Stalinist atrocities have taken up enough mental real estate of late that I dreamt last night that my old elementary school was an underground prison.<br />
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But these atrocities are in a sense all around us; their memory is omnipresent, from their rather central role in school curricula to the use of Nazi and Soviet history as the ultimate in taboo humor. They inform our discourse, and similes involving them are ubiquitous.<br />
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Most of these similes are too stupid to take seriously. Comparing Obama to Hitler is so self-evidently moronic that I half suspect that no one truly believes it, people just want to believe it. But more insidiously, some people use deliberately vague terms as a way to invite comparison between the democratic welfare state and authoritarianism. Such comparisons are as useless and unenlightening as they are offensive.<br />
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They are not obvious, however. Because one can define one's terms to make such a comparison true, in a trivial way. You can, for instance, define all those who do not believe in absolute individual liberty as 'statists' or 'collectivists.' By this definition, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler are all 'statists.' But in so doing you have done nothing -- you've just invented a word that means 'everyone that disagrees with me' and applied it appropriately. Such a word is not a term of history, but merely a propaganda tool, a linguistic trick designed to paint all your opponents with a Stalinist brush.<br />
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You may protest, that this is a philosophical term, one that accurately describes people's values, to which I would reply, simply -- hogwash. On the contrary, such a way of speaking shows a perversely abstract way of viewing human belief, human morality and human action, where the bad thing about Stalin was not that he murdered millions, but that he did not believe in individual property rights. Interestingly, on this point the libertarian agrees with the 1930's Communist apologist, who saw Stalin as just another progressive fighting for equality.<br />
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By their fruits ye shall know them. Any term that turns us away from the actual impact that ideas have on human beings is a perversity, an intellectual temptation to lose sight of our fellow man. To guard against this we must view 20th century atrocities not as myths or abstractions, but as historical facts, the products of particular systems. Not merely a watchword for everything we hate.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-951974321444633938.post-45737568974285650922013-04-14T11:03:00.001-07:002013-04-14T16:19:52.815-07:00Bloodlands: Something of a ReviewI've finished Timothy Snyder's well-crafted but monumentally depressing book, <u>Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler 1933-1945</u>. As I said before, it is a must read for anyone interested in 20th century European history, WWII or 20th century authoritarianism and its attendant atrocities.<br />
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I was struck by a few things about it. For one, Snyder has enough literary and moral sensibility to place horrific events in a human and moral context without losing sight of cause and effect. In particular, his conclusion, which combines history, ethics and politics, would make the book worth reading even if the rest of the book was just tables of fatalities. This conclusion is by turns moving, intellectually probing and at times it presents a quiet challenge to the cliches we are so often fed about these atrocities. <br />
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Another brilliant thing about Snyder is that he effortlessly blends history with historiography, and shows how the memory of these events is inextricably linked with the events themselves and the hatred and fear that produced them. The chapter 'Stalinist Anti-Semitism' is not properly a tale of deliberate mass killing (like most of the other chapters), but a story of how continued bigotry and a sort of perverse authoritarian/nationalist 'oppression olympics' guaranteed that the true nature of what transpired in 'the Bloodlands' (and in particular the singular nature of the murder of the Jews) would be obscured in the East, guaranteeing that the Holocaust is remembered from a narrow and western perspective.<br />
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Apparently some historians of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany have objected to placing Stalinist famine and terror side by side with the Holocaust, arguing that it furthers the tendency to portray the Shoah as just another horror* among many, and in particular to mitigate its atrocities by equating them with those of Stalin. Of course this equation is a genuine right-wing tactic of Nazi apologia; to portray Hitler and Stalin as equivalent and Hitler as fundamentally defending himself from Stalinist aggression and terror, the Nazis themselves portrayed their actions as such. I would category deny that this is the case. On the contrary, the isolation of accounts of the Holocaust from the mainstream of European history -prevent- the understanding of what makes it different from say, the Great Terror or the famines, prevents us from understanding what makes the Nazis' genocidal war of aggression a crime without parallel in 20th century Europe. By placing the murder of the Jews alongside the murder of Ukrainean/Polish peasants, Polish officers and Soviet POWs, Snyder can show the singularity of the Jewish experience in WWII, rather than merely stating 'the Jewish experience is singular' and dismissing all comparisons as a form of 'soft denialism.' Only by placing the Shoah back into the context of Eastern European history in the 20th century can we truly understand it.<br />
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For myself, my only serious critique is that Snyder puts too much stock in the idea that the Germans started losing the war the moment Operation Barbarossa started, and starting killing Jews en masse only when things went wrong. He states that the campaign took longer than expected (true) and did not progress as rapidly -geographically- as planned, but he neglects the fact that in terms of effectively destroying Red Army units, the Nazis had no reason to think in August 1941 that they were anything other than decisively victorious. They captured millions of Red Army soldiers, destroyed the Red Air Force on the ground and had destroyed or captured thousands of tanks, guns and other pieces of equipment. Their failure lay in the fact that this did not destroy the Red Army, or break the back of the Soviet Union. But they didn't know this until they were stuck in mud and snow at the gates of Moscow. By that point, Latvia was already 'Judenfrei' and the Einsatzgruppen had started their massacres in earnest. Now this does not invalidate his point (that the lack of a decisive victory in the East led to adopting mass murder as the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Question') but it requires a bit more legwork and exploration than he puts in, which is unfortunate given how exaggerated his claims of German failure in 1941 are.<br />
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His general point, however, that the Holocaust and the Holdomor and the Great Terror arose from a feeling of self-righteous, bigoted defensiveness, is one that does not get repeated enough. It is a defensiveness that argues that the victim is attacking the murderer, and that even the death of the victim is a kind of moral attack, assaulting the murderer with an accusation of guilt. On a more concrete level, the horrific quote from a Viennes policemen, who writes his wife that shooting children like clay pigeons his hard, but 'these' 'Bolshevic' hordes would do worse to his family otherwise, is very revealing. In the case the Holocaust, his emphasis on it as 'revenge' for various German reversals is a very convincing explanation of Nazi psychology, that dovetails well with Hitler's history of framing persecutions (such as the Kristallnacht) and power-grabs (the Enabling Acts) as revenge or as a defensive response to some 'attack.'<br />
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This returns us to his conclusion, which warns against the power of bigoted fears in our own time. Bloodlands is not just a great work of history, it is a timely work, given that so much of our contemporary world is struggling to 'own' the right to shape the remembrance of the 20th century's atrocities.<br />
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*While I would certainly object to arguing that the Holocaust is simply equivalent to the Middle Passage, Aparthied and United States Indian Policy 1783-1960 (as some on the Left will do), I do not see why Rwanda or Armenia are not equivalent crimes, but that is another story.Wilhelmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01296745240824636336noreply@blogger.com0