tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-299030462024-03-18T03:17:17.020-04:00Open Hand/Open EyeCycling, peacemaking, environmental justice, freedom, responsibility, and sometimes whimsyJohn Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.comBlogger352125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-82177345723153410572024-03-13T18:36:00.007-04:002024-03-13T22:02:58.710-04:00Oppression and atrocity<p>This post deals with the accounts of sexual violence in the Hamas-led assault on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It thus necessarily includes references to rape, homicide, and crimes of extreme violence.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJP_gEn6aKZ2Hs87Q2imxOsKlKhXD_BEMAjo-sXtbKViSPq3ebpha2-c8FYXpObEu0Ym6pJyADhyphenhyphenSfZATQxg_BSIFPTlVG85PmojFd7a3eCH8acHOn16JaDKUi5VWKkU4f38_YZPtxSUkoZp3rhwc68LfvBAhpHZGSRv-8IzYJmUiCf9xrTMrEeA/s3167/Flag-of-the-United-Nations.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2113" data-original-width="3167" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJP_gEn6aKZ2Hs87Q2imxOsKlKhXD_BEMAjo-sXtbKViSPq3ebpha2-c8FYXpObEu0Ym6pJyADhyphenhyphenSfZATQxg_BSIFPTlVG85PmojFd7a3eCH8acHOn16JaDKUi5VWKkU4f38_YZPtxSUkoZp3rhwc68LfvBAhpHZGSRv-8IzYJmUiCf9xrTMrEeA/w200-h134/Flag-of-the-United-Nations.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>A United Nations investigative team has now <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68474899">submitted</a> a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/4/reasonable-grounds-to-believe-hamas-committed-sexual-violence-un">report</a>, finding credible evidence the Hamas fighters committed acts of sexual violence, both during the initial assault on southern Israel on October 7, and also against those they held hostage.<p></p><p>In all the things people can say, and have an obligation to say about this report, a number of things stand out. Start with the obvious: "credible evidence" does not mean certainty. If subsequent investigation should disprove these allegations unfounded, we should all celebrate: any woman not suffering rape, not violated in life or death, is good news. But that is also to say there is no excuse, whatever, for this kind of violence. Nor, now, do we have any excuse for ignoring or dismissing the possibility Hamas fighters, or people associated with them, did commit these atrocities. </p><p>We can't justify the violation of Israeli women by Hamas by pointing to claims, also under investigation, that Israeli soldiers have assaulted and violated Palestinians. Nor do we have to justify, or ignore, claims about brutality by Hamas to uphold Palestinian rights. The children of Gaza are innocent, and their suffering is unjust. No actions of Hamas cancel or reduce the rights of Palestinians who had no hand and no say in them.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><br />Among the calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, among the myriad of accusations against Israel, I see disturbingly few efforts to address or even acknowledge the need for investigation of the accusations of gender-based violence against Hamas and its fighters. Even writers of posts explicitly linking International Women's Day with the war in Gaza have somehow managed to ignore the violation of Israeli women.<p></p><p>Most of those responsible for ignoring the accounts of crimes by Hamas are not bothering to justify their omission, but one argument for the reluctance to discuss the credible accusations against Hamas stands out, because it betrays a fundamental error about the nature of oppression.</p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2AxPzTkibdrEtvWaUjkrCRWn71pS1E4EEBM8g_Z0N3zgW_BThmEQm55v8Z4xYulOSDBC5wjmTSMU4uYC2JqVhHCMudjXvblfg9URCJok8DtW85HAYp8ef1NWntDA6JdPXNG-i_kUTPzWGUohO1flAgFvlANW9SzTt0GGeP1fYkaXUu1Gul8fYMQ/s3000/Rape%20,_1961_-_NARA_-_558919.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"> <br /></a></p><p>This argument rests on the claim the rest of us, living in peace and safety, have no right to judge the means by which an oppressed people resist. This may sound like a liberating acknowledgement of oppression, even support for rough justice, bit it is nothing of the kind. It is, in fact, a surrender. It is an acceptance of one of the oldest and most vile tools of the oppressor. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCV8ruyyQ0uhERD9UJZ-8aaMX1uyLJl8FQj0mkOSluTwwJtXIaPqVvyLLu0tyggiFitZmmjJ49cVdzp0oNteMSPnjnwldhsVuCobeoR_dGo_YPy4xZg2DcL9fihRm1Tf3eVrmHxzBsSPQpU0LCCh9CSAsYmsm9vWZkQENZZRGJciObpU-6JF2vTw/s4032/Marcha_8M_2024_GDL_04.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Feminist symbol with Memory truth and justice in Spanish" border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCV8ruyyQ0uhERD9UJZ-8aaMX1uyLJl8FQj0mkOSluTwwJtXIaPqVvyLLu0tyggiFitZmmjJ49cVdzp0oNteMSPnjnwldhsVuCobeoR_dGo_YPy4xZg2DcL9fihRm1Tf3eVrmHxzBsSPQpU0LCCh9CSAsYmsm9vWZkQENZZRGJciObpU-6JF2vTw/w240-h320/Marcha_8M_2024_GDL_04.jpg" title="Mtenaespinoza, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons" width="240" /></a></div><br />The first target of the oppressor is the human dignity of their intended victims. That first theft enables all the thefts to come: land, resources, labour, bodies and lives. The first action is the taking of dignity. To facilitate that first robbery, the oppressor offers a devil's bargain: the oppressor will refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the victim, but in return will not hold the victim to any of the normal standards of decency or self-restraint. Thus, slave owners encouraged promiscuity among their slaves as they refused to acknowledge slave marriages. Thus, the Nazis designed brothels into their concentration camps. Thus European colonizers supplied whisky to Indigenous people and opium to China. Degradation is not an incidental product of oppression; it is the foundation on which oppression is built. <p></p><p>Thus the first, most fundamental form of resistance to oppression is the determination to live up to ordinary standards of conduct, to behave with dignity even in the face of an oppressor who does not recognize your dignity (and in refusing to do so, devalues their own). This is why Paul of Tarsus wrote to slave populations in the Roman Empire calling upon them to live with the dignity fitting a redeemed people. This is why the great liberation movements among African Americans, from the civil rights movement to the Nation of Islam, emphasized dignity and self restraint in the face of imposed poverty and degradation. </p><p>This is why it is profoundly wrong to minimize, or ignore the accusations of atrocities levelled against Hamas fighters. These accusations must either be convincingly refuted, or they must be named, and those responsible must be held accountable. It is not for us to determine what this will mean in practice, but I believe everyone who stands for the Palestinians has a responsibility to separate anyone guilty of these atrocities, and any organization accountable for them, from the Palestinians as a people. Not to do so allows the atrocities alleged against fighters for one organization to stain a whole people, and that serves the worst of their oppressors.<br /></p><p><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-85873759669013321412024-03-01T00:35:00.001-05:002024-03-01T00:35:14.876-05:00We've been here before: A personal view of the Israel-Hamas conflict<p> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim7XMWBAnSOPlZCYH4CeYIpdPa_13zDC1fCbgjypipam1tx6ZpL6zpmR2Bz8wKboyy9mRC-91vpgskb0IIyz8I9nrbFGBFlSLerN3nB8G6xm42Ld5aIfvTyksxvHYp8RHGWumrTwPVfBtJGExotBbKcyBMO2tr8ezI-GBInIDzvmfxNRvGYzpMFA/s320/Flag_of_Kach_and_Kahane_Chai.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Flacg of the Kach and Kahane Chai party and movement" border="0" data-original-height="192" data-original-width="320" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim7XMWBAnSOPlZCYH4CeYIpdPa_13zDC1fCbgjypipam1tx6ZpL6zpmR2Bz8wKboyy9mRC-91vpgskb0IIyz8I9nrbFGBFlSLerN3nB8G6xm42Ld5aIfvTyksxvHYp8RHGWumrTwPVfBtJGExotBbKcyBMO2tr8ezI-GBInIDzvmfxNRvGYzpMFA/w266-h160/Flag_of_Kach_and_Kahane_Chai.svg.png" title="R-41, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Flag of Kach/Kahane Chai<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Over the last five months, the dialogue between Israel and the international community, including some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the international community, has begun more and more to resemble the conversation at an intervention. The participants all express support, sympathy, solidarity with Israel, emphasize their friendship, and slowly work around to the lengthening list of symptoms suggesting their friend has gone off the rails. The sense of dismay at the behaviour of the Israeli government grows steadily more apparent. Increasingly, we see calls for moderation, expressed willingness to broker and support a settlement leading to peace and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and behind those words of encouragement the seldom bluntly stated but increasingly solid consensus that the behaviour of the current government of Israel will lead to catastrophe.</p><p>Perhaps a memory of my own can help explain why this is happening. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>During the Al-Aqsa intafada of the early part of this century, I remember being appalled by an attack carried out by Hamas: an attacker had shot of bombed a family at prayer, killing many Israeli Jews. The attack solidified my disgust at Hamas. There are things you don't do, not in war, not ever, and slaughtering people at prayer comes high on that list. While I recognized, and still recognize, Hamas as an extremist faction, I have to admit that, reasonably or not, the stark brutality of the massacre by Hamas cooled my sympathy for the Palestinian cause.</p><p>Then, my work for Indigenous justice in Canada brought me into contact with people working for peace in Israel and Palestine, and I encountered the story of Baruch Goldstein. Of course, I knew about him. I had been appalled by his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre">massacre of Muslim worshippers</a> at Hebron in 1994; I had read Yitzhak Rabin's statement that Goldstein was "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism", and assumed Goldstein was a single individual acting out their own mental instability. It was only when I began to study the conflicts in the Israeli occupied West Bank that I learned Goldstien was lauded as a hero and a martyr by many in extremes of the the Jewish movement to settle the West Bank.</p><p>The current Israeli <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir">Minister of National Security</a>, Itamar Ben-Gvir, kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room until he took it down after he entered politics. This is not a matter of right versus left; it is a question of whether Israel's commitment to abide by the law of nations in conflict will hold. We have plenty of evidence Hamas does not recognize any restraints, practical or ethical, on its behaviour. International leaders have begun to confront the disturbing evidence that influential voices within the Israeli government want their country to do the same. </p><p>I made my journey to hope tempered by awareness of the worst impulses on both side a long time ago. The rhetoric coming out of many world capitals, and out of the world court, suggest many national leaders and international officials have made, or are making, the same journey I did. <br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-2720305703957907032024-02-29T20:12:00.003-05:002024-02-29T23:36:46.919-05:00Letter to Stephen Holyday<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzG23FY6DC8xPaIR1FgknJ01ICe1-LpucGxsK3F6DNXzldjX45yOXvow2BEB_doFtCbgGc6g1s-vt33eVMCz025qkqM4Wo8HO2KhpCWGqM4vwVWQHi5b0Y-oR1LQMviqnozAEPHbwjTyqUlV7wrFBqb_nbIkQPUl7LpSKj23g8Z-cFwD6B8D6cnw/s320/A_bike_customized_for_carrying_both_children_and_cargo..._(47263549611).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="A parked cargo bike" border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzG23FY6DC8xPaIR1FgknJ01ICe1-LpucGxsK3F6DNXzldjX45yOXvow2BEB_doFtCbgGc6g1s-vt33eVMCz025qkqM4Wo8HO2KhpCWGqM4vwVWQHi5b0Y-oR1LQMviqnozAEPHbwjTyqUlV7wrFBqb_nbIkQPUl7LpSKj23g8Z-cFwD6B8D6cnw/w320-h240/A_bike_customized_for_carrying_both_children_and_cargo..._(47263549611).jpg" title="booledozer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></div>Last night, February 28, Councillor Holyday convened a meeting to discuss the Bloor Street bike lanes. The discussion revealed a number of things, including some of the illusions cherished by advocates for the car in this city. One thing the meeting made particularly clear was the extent to which transportation has evolved into a political and cultural issue, the way so many issues, in so many people's minds, have fused together into a picture they project, to themselves and others, of who they are. Thirty years ago, the fiercest cycling advocates I knew were ardent conservatives; today, despising bike and cycle lanes has become part of a prepackaged identity labelled "conservative". It doesn't have to be this way.<br /><p></p><p> In response to my observations at this meeting, I have written an open letter I am sending to Councillor Holyday, my own city councillor, and the mayor of Toronto. You can read it after the jump.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p><br /></p><p>Councillor Holyday:</p><p>Last night, February 28, you convened a public forum to discuss the Bloor Street bike lanes, specifically the lanes running from the Humber to Aberfoyle Crescent. You asked people to write to members of council, and so I am writing this open letter to you, my own councillor (Amber Morley), and the mayor's office, as well as posting it publicly.</p><p>To start with the positive: the Bloor Street bike lanes represent a set of compromises, which have resulted in a design with flaws in both the safety they offer cyclists and the congestion they impose on other road users, particularly first responders. Put simply, the cycle lane design used for much of the Bloor bike lanes, having the bicycle route "protected" by a line of parked cars, both makes it difficult for turning motorists to see cyclists, creates a risk to cyclists from opening car doors, and a corresponding risk to people crossing the lanes to board their cars. In the case of the Kingsway, where a median divides the road, this design clearly has the unacceptable side effect of narrowing the road. </p><p>The criticism directed at modifications to low speed local roads also had considerable merit: some of these installations seem to have little to no purpose beside adding to the length of cycleways installed by the city. </p><p>All that said, the general tenor of the meeting suggests some profound delusions about the future of transportation in this city. Put simply, the population continues to swell, even if it will grow more slowly in the future, the number of people here will grow more quickly than we could expand road capacity, even if we wanted to. If we want to avoid complete gridlock, we have to provide alternatives to the car, and we have to make them safe. If you want criticism of the current bike lanes, their design, routing, and effectiveness to succeed, you must have some alternative to offer. I saw no such willingness to offer or even consider alternatives to the current Bloor lanes. Instead, I saw hostility to the whole idea of cycling as urban transportation. This rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of automobiles to this city, both as a matter of geometry and of economics.<br /></p><p>It's clear the private car offers the least space efficiency of any form of transport, but that doesn't capture the scope of the problem. Toronto has an <a href="https://www.blogto.com/city/2014/07/how_many_cars_are_on_the_road_in_toronto/">estimated</a> 1.1 million cars registered. For that many cars to drive downtown at 60 km/h, we would have to pave the entire city from Jane to Woodbine, Steeles to Lake Ontario. We can't solve the congestion in this city by expanding the road network in any way. We can only reduce congestion by driving less. </p><p>Finally, one outburst at the meeting clearly exposed, for anyone paying attention, both the cultural problem with our automobile dependence, and the reason so many Toronto residents have less problem with congestion that you might expect. One of the individuals at the microphone spoke of his desire to hit cyclists who (as is quite legal and safe) rode in the lane on streets such as the Queensway. This violent and irresponsible attitude among motorists causes many people to not only ignore congestion, but to desire it as one of the few ways to slow down people who treat cars as weapons to enforce their own ideas about who belongs, and act out their own tantrums. </p><p>As an example, consider Parkside, one of the connecting streets between Bloor and Lakeshore. Recently, we have seen a push for bike lanes on these roads. This push does not come primarily from cyclists; we already have a the High Park road network. The primary pressure for bike lanes on Parkside comes from the local community, in an effort to make the street safer. A few years ago now, a speeding motorist killed two elderly and respected members of the community; their friends and relatives, naturally outraged, resolved to calm the traffic on Parkside. As long as such irresponsible attitudes in Toronto's motoring community exist, as long as those who claim to speak, culturally and politically, for Toronto motorists let these attitudes pass without a rebuke, then the rest of us will work to protect ourselves. If motorists won't exercise self control, we will do it for them, with bollards and k-rails if we have to. </p><p>All in all, it was an illuminating meeting, and confirmed both the need for attention to the designed cycling facilities, and the importance of improving, and extending, the alternatives to car dependence in this city. </p><p></p><p>Best regards,</p><p> John Spragge <br /></p><p><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-81731481952777446412024-02-28T06:02:00.001-05:002024-02-28T06:03:00.067-05:00Yet another modest proposal<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQy6c05fVtZtygUtDQqp8wwtRxwEOqv5qUwhmX7gkD0E_sp_3GwpKWSHDV5nRRUntPSdmya-zT2DbOTgOf3YrqMtrWGFqvEMIP6iCIMT5piTAMZxBSRFtLGvWJztUY2ex3eJ9bPO3uADtoYLOrxrOt69c3JCTSB2fpgnRiID5jgGKwj8LhUP1Wqg/s4928/TrafficJamFrustration.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Driver smacking head in frustration over traffic" border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="4928" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQy6c05fVtZtygUtDQqp8wwtRxwEOqv5qUwhmX7gkD0E_sp_3GwpKWSHDV5nRRUntPSdmya-zT2DbOTgOf3YrqMtrWGFqvEMIP6iCIMT5piTAMZxBSRFtLGvWJztUY2ex3eJ9bPO3uADtoYLOrxrOt69c3JCTSB2fpgnRiID5jgGKwj8LhUP1Wqg/w217-h143/TrafficJamFrustration.jpg" title="Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons" width="217" /></a></div><br />There is no such thing as he "war on the car". Whether we view cars as their physical reality, tin boxes with a wheel at each corner, or as concepts, or as cultural tropes, cars are not moral agents and do not have a right of self defence. If we as a society choose to limit or even eliminate the operation of private automobiles in our society, or particularly in our cities, we can do so. It requires no war and no conflict. We are not in a war; we are having a debate. <p></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>As with any debate, each side has the right to make its case. In the debate over the place of the private automobile,the ubiquitous presence of advertising by car manufacturers complicates the discussion. While car manufacturers' advertising aims to sell vehicles, and vehicles of a particular make and model, car advertising creates a particular image of motor vehicle use that influences, and distorts, the discussion of the use we as a society make of the automobile.<br /></p><p>The public, both the motoring and non-motoring public, devotes a large proportion of public space to the operation and storage of private automobiles. City dwellers pay, through property taxes, to build and maintain urban roads required for mass motoring. We all pay the environmental and human costs of a system that relies on the private car for a large proportion of our transportation. We can reasonably expect the contribution automobile manufacturers make to our discussion of these costs, through their advertising, to meet minimal standards of realism.</p><div><p>I propose the following standards for vehicle advertising. None of these are either onerous or original. Most of them simply adhere to the principle of truth in advertising.</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Advertising for motor vehicles must reflect the actual conditions of use. We should forbid depictions of professional drivers on closed courses designed to sell family sedans or sport utility vehicles.</li><li>We should forbid the depiction of fantasies depicting drivers dominating their surroundings.</li><li>We should require depictions of traffic to reflect the realities of urban traffic. We should not allow car commercials and promotions to depict cars moving freely down the streets of major cities, or drivers parking right outside their destinations.</li><li>Just as we require pharmaceutical companies to include a hurried recitation of the side effects of their drugs, we should require automobile advertising to include a summary of the real costs of owning and operating a car. If the car's selling point is its low cost, lack of maintenance problems, and low gas consumption, then the cost summary provided can reflect that, but it must still include average insurance, parking, and fuel costs. Manufacturers and their advertisers should have to justify their given cost summaries, particularly if they differ significantly from the assessments of neutral parties such as consumer groups. All motor vehicle advertising should be required to provide this information in terms of working hours for an average wage earner: a statement such as "an average Canadian worker will have to spend sixty full days of work each year to own (or lease) and operate this vehicle."<br /></li></ol><p>This list only addresses the basic economic and practical aspects of motor vehicle operation; these are aspects, and costs, of motor vehicle use that affect almost all drivers. While I consider the environmental and human costs of motor vehicles more important than the economic costs, requiring motor vehicle advertisers would prove both difficult and highly controversial.</p><p>Still, an advertising code for motor vehicles would bring the expectations of drivers down to reality, and might well reduce the frustrations created by the visible difference between the fantasies of professional drivers on closed courses, and the realities of urban driving. <br /></p><p><br /></p></div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-31122620307973143192024-02-16T05:57:00.002-05:002024-02-16T05:57:17.354-05:00Antisemitism<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifl1IYiosdlh_iYU-SCvk30YL-Cpg47XNpiwekMa7eH1JlzD0Q9dLuonoQSPebZMFrK-7XlV__d-ZcljIGrlmO_APc99ij79WrpmDMly1MSyPH16Xlnsg8GqlvglGS_LI9DBK9kDGONBPuufAbllFOy11jDyGyfjjXHKbkeJAHTCBqololWjb7PA/s2048/Viva_Maria_Siena%20-%20antisemitism.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Commemorative plaque of the 13 Sienese Jews burnt alive in Piazza del Campo in Siena the 28th of June 1799 by the "Viva Maria" followers. The plaque is affixed abreast of the Synagogue of Siena, in "vicolo delle Scotte"." border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifl1IYiosdlh_iYU-SCvk30YL-Cpg47XNpiwekMa7eH1JlzD0Q9dLuonoQSPebZMFrK-7XlV__d-ZcljIGrlmO_APc99ij79WrpmDMly1MSyPH16Xlnsg8GqlvglGS_LI9DBK9kDGONBPuufAbllFOy11jDyGyfjjXHKbkeJAHTCBqololWjb7PA/w200-h150/Viva_Maria_Siena%20-%20antisemitism.JPG" title="Commemorative plaque of the 13 Sienese Jews burnt alive in Piazza del Campo in Siena the 28th of June 1799 by the "Viva Maria" followers. The plaque is affixed abreast of the Synagogue of Siena, in "vicolo delle Scotte". The plaque says: «Victims of the anti-jacobin reaction and of the anti-Semitic hate, thirteen Jewish citizens were burnt in Piazza del Campo the 28th of June 1799 by the "Viva Maria" fanatics that had devastated the ancient ghetto. «Two hundreds years late, under the ashes of the liberty pole used for the awful stake, a touched memory is still lively in Siena. «The municipality of Siena - 28th June 1999». Author: PMM82" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Memorial for victims of antisemitism<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Start at the beginning: antisemitism is wrong. Full stop, no excuses, no qualifications. It's wrong. <br /></p><p>Our society has a longer record of antisemitism than we have of anti-Black racism or anti-Indigenous oppression. Europeans persecuted the Jewish community before Columbus and after, before the Atlantic slave trade and after. Anti-Semitic hate has driven some of the most calculated and methodical mass murders in history.<br /></p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a> <p></p><p>Just don't. Don't persecute Jewish people, don't condone or support people who persecute, threaten or murder them. If that makes activism harder, it should be hard that way. Justice never arises from harming innocent people. If rejecting antisemitism makes your narratives complicated, good. Politics today suffers from an infestation of simple, romantic narratives.</p><p>Needless to say, Jewish people and Jewish institutions have no more claim to perfection than any other people or any other institution. When Jewish people and institutions behave in ways we perceive as unethical, it helps to filter our responses past the following two questions: first, who exactly committed the unethical act or made the unethical statement? Criticize that person, those people, or that institution. Second, would you feel the same outrage if, say, a Ukrainian or a Maori or an African American had done the same thing? If you can't answer, honestly, in the affirmative, cool down until you can.</p><p>While I was composing this post, an incident occurred that illustrates the problem, and like everything that illustrates a problem, it offers possible solutions. A protest march calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza and a ceasefire marched past Mount Sinai Hospital, and one or two participants climbed construction scaffolding in front of the hospital. Some members of the Toronto Jewish community reacted with alarm, and politicians condemned the incident as antisemitic. Organizers and people who spoke for the march denied they had any antisemitic intent. Context matters here: members of the Jewish community have reason to feel raw and vulnerable, not only because of the events of October 7, but also because of violent incidents of antisemitism in Canada, with <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/jewish-schools-doors-shot-1.7023759">shots fired</a> at Jewish Schools and <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/10075973/montreal-synagogue-firebombing/">firebombings</a>. Under those circumstances, it makes sense for the peace marchers to back their denial by apologizing and avoiding Mount Sinai Hospital in the future. Toronto has a great many streets, and plenty of ways to get to the American consulate (the destination of the march) without going by one of Toronto's major Jewish institutions.</p><p>Making the same proactive effort to avoid expression that read as antisemitism has the same reason, and the same rewards, as avoiding racial or sexist stereotypes. In a time of high tensions, it not only makes sense in political terms; common decency requires it. <br /></p><p><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-37098731684975688662024-01-28T13:28:00.001-05:002024-01-28T13:28:09.586-05:00In the empty spaces between the words...Does "make America great again" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again">signal a desire</a> for a recovery of American self confidence and more products made in the United States, or a last clutch at a white supremacist social order? Either, or both, depending on who you ask. <div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfo6B6-nCLrgN8xJn0baKFvyWceVDBTDsqlMEpVhnEmHJTOjpd0JdC4hBaEuihMbhLOrF6HJgyPuFp-vO5Gp7XknauLose6LLcDAr0Qvh9XlEj5QuYJKZyBchglVu9w5A5-LbjT3IXTeIx8ibpXfhQNCankj_TY-fE8w5Ydrai6L1fv9aDz0PmhA/s2191/demonstration%20collage.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Collage with slogans and demonstrators behind a silhouette of a woman with megaphone" border="0" data-original-height="1639" data-original-width="2191" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfo6B6-nCLrgN8xJn0baKFvyWceVDBTDsqlMEpVhnEmHJTOjpd0JdC4hBaEuihMbhLOrF6HJgyPuFp-vO5Gp7XknauLose6LLcDAr0Qvh9XlEj5QuYJKZyBchglVu9w5A5-LbjT3IXTeIx8ibpXfhQNCankj_TY-fE8w5Ydrai6L1fv9aDz0PmhA/w320-h239/demonstration%20collage.png" title="Collage using ai generated crowd (deviant art dream up) and silhouette from public domain vectors" width="320" /></a></div>Does "defund the police" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police">refer to a proposal to shift responsibility</a> for social and mental health issues from the police, jails, and prisons, and redirect the associated funding to health and social service agencies, or does it mean disbanding all police agencies? It depends on who you ask; I have heard both interpretations of the slogan asserted with conviction.</div><div><br /></div><div>Does the slogan "land back" mean Indigenous nations should have <a href="https://www.ttbook.org/interview/how-land-back-movement-reclaiming-land-stolen-indigenous-people">increased jurisdiction</a> over resource development, land use, and environmental decision making within their traditional territories, or does it mean packing "<a href="https://engagedharma.net/2016/05/17/decolonization-is-not-a-metaphor-basics-of-a-genuine-anti-colonial-position/">white" people back</a> to their place of origin?</div><div> </div><div>Does the chant "from the river to the sea" call for a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-state_solution">single, democratic, non-confessional state</a> with room for all believers between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean a single Palestinian Muslim-majority state from which Jewish inhabitants, or most of them, have fled or forced to leave? Does it mean a single Jewish Israeli state from the Mediterranean, as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Similar_sayings_by_the_Israeli_right">Likud slogan has advocated</a>, or even <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-seeks-to-calm-waters-with-jordan-after-racist-extremist-speech-by-smotrich/">beyond the Jordan</a>, as some advocates of "Biblical Israel" claim?</div><div><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div>Simplistic slogans, policies reduced to rhyming couplets or a 140 character micro-blog postings have the disadvantages of their advantage: they allow large numbers of people to coalesce around an issue without needing a clear idea of what they want. Three people can chant side by side in a demonstration without ever knowing if they want the same thing, or if what they each want could ever fit into a consensus any government could turn into a policy. This allows large crowds to gather and passionately advocate, even if they cannot change their advocacy into action. Indeed, demonstrators can, and sometimes do, march and chant with little or no idea of what the rhymes and chants mean.</div><div><br /></div><div>Demonstrations without a clear and actionable program to advocate have a void at their center, and opponents will gladly fill that space with their own claims about what the demonstrators advocate. Supporters of Israel have lost no time advancing their own definition of "from the river to the sea": The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/from-the-river-to-the-sea-where-does-the-slogan-come-from-and-what-does-it-mean-israel-palestine">former British home secretary</a> Suella Braverman described the slogan as "widely
understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel... Attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous.” This phrasing bears some analysis, because the two parts of the statement, while literally true, leave a misleading impression. Many people do indeed interpret the slogan as a call for the destruction of Israel, and indeed, it does strongly imply a call for fundamental change in the nature, or at least to policies, of the Israeli state. That does not mean all, or many, or even any of the people chanting this slogan advocate expelling the Jewish population from the current state of Israel. Adding the phrase "attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous" suggests the phrase has a universally agreed upon meaning, a single meaning the diverse political entities that have used the phrase could obviously never agree on. While Ms. Braverman could obviously not have read the intentions of the demonstrators from one ambiguous slogan, her tweet does make one true statement: many people find the demonstrations and the chant intimidating, because they fear the demonstrators advocate for the most extreme meaning of the slogan.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe unclear slogans do more harm than good. The drawbacks range from a lack of clarity, a lack of any real program or coherent demand, to the ability of opponents to attack the most extreme interpretation of the slogan; these more than cancel any advantage derived from a widespread apparent consensus. Since I certainly believe I have the obligation to bear witness to my beliefs in public, and since I, with ten thousand people in the street, can hardly read out a detailed manifesto together, I have three suggestions for the organizers of any demonstration.<br /></div><div> </div><div>First: if you organize a demonstration where you expect participants will use an ambiguous slogan, agree on what you mean by it, and what you expect participants to mean, and publish a clear statement with the meaning. Even better, avoid slogans with multiple meanings, especially when some of those meanings call for ethnic cleansing. </div><div> </div><div>Second: have a specific goal. No public demonstration the power to fix everything about an issue. A demonstration that leads a government, business, or person to do something or stop doing just one thing has managed a greater success than the vast majority of marches, sit-ins, or pickets. In relation to the unfolding strife in Southwest Asia, demonstrators have no shortage of specific actions to demand. All but a few extremists can agree to a demand to feed the children of Gaza. A call for negotiation not retaliation, while more controversial in some quarters, might well save many Israeli as well as Palestinian lives. A demonstration with a limited goal such as these might or might not succeed, but it at least has a focus on an actionable demand. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, remember to follow the first rule of medicine: don't make things worse. Demonstrations matter. They have a greater purpose than simple self
expression or a release of anger. They aim to stand in solidarity with
communities, often deeply traumatized and profoundly divided
communities. If a demonstration hardens opposition without serving any other purpose, it has done the opposite of what a demonstration ought to accomplish. Going further: if wording a chant or slogan in one way leads to confusion, pain, and hostility, it makes sense to choose words with a clear meaning. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> </div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-22196772251268344912024-01-16T16:14:00.001-05:002024-01-16T16:14:44.613-05:00Talk is cheap <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2A9Xx7zRul_rr0zWQTCoAz9zvlrcO_sYBggv8HrcQoIX1GPaoSJEenh-w5gRhEnd_q_6pFXEy0rXY-BdPig3FsfIhm9XqiB7riA1euKhynzo-Y3WvYSN0coVWSReg0_ye49QoyyJ-40DK80Tv7v1AQNRTK1jfnu4Nvxa_MaA_4t8ZUMM0A2iQQ/s673/Scales_of_Justice_and_Wreath.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="673" height="81" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2A9Xx7zRul_rr0zWQTCoAz9zvlrcO_sYBggv8HrcQoIX1GPaoSJEenh-w5gRhEnd_q_6pFXEy0rXY-BdPig3FsfIhm9XqiB7riA1euKhynzo-Y3WvYSN0coVWSReg0_ye49QoyyJ-40DK80Tv7v1AQNRTK1jfnu4Nvxa_MaA_4t8ZUMM0A2iQQ/w93-h81/Scales_of_Justice_and_Wreath.png" width="93" /></a></div><br />Germany has come out strongly in support of Israel's position at the International Court of Justice and against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa. The statement from Germany mentioned a sense of obligation felt by the current German government as a result of the mass murders of Jewish people committed by Nazi Germany. <span><a name='more'></a></span><div>The question of what the German government and the German people today owe the descendants of Holocaust survivors matters, but it has no direct connection with the factual issue before the International Court of Justice. The current actions of the Israeli government in Gaza either fit the definition of genocide, a crime against humanity, or they do not. German history may give the German government a particular obligation to speak out, but it doesn't change the facts. Indeed, I would argue, the history of mass murders committed by Nazi Germany has created a much greater obligation for the German government, and the German people today.</div><div> </div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXMK9giiX124YFfI9AQaiExVUk61VV9NpiP-RwPaPB0bBXpnYl9D1C1BOWm7uTXxfO7XukM8Pu3D16GAitydrsPe17sW7AikGdfdvHyBQv6JxlDr8PvwF9S51cfaFs6s2mqMb8FSM4pRO9m1__KczgAgpb-jAvzr_8-PjJ4Ug-q5yUYOhLytbLhw/s2475/Shadows%20of%20the%20holocaust.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Concentration camp symbols (gates and chimney) with shadows cast." border="0" data-original-height="2332" data-original-width="2475" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXMK9giiX124YFfI9AQaiExVUk61VV9NpiP-RwPaPB0bBXpnYl9D1C1BOWm7uTXxfO7XukM8Pu3D16GAitydrsPe17sW7AikGdfdvHyBQv6JxlDr8PvwF9S51cfaFs6s2mqMb8FSM4pRO9m1__KczgAgpb-jAvzr_8-PjJ4Ug-q5yUYOhLytbLhw/w320-h302/Shadows%20of%20the%20holocaust.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The camps cast a long shadow...<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>The conflict in Gaza has to end, if only from exhaustion. Whether or not you believe the estimates by figures in the IDF, who claim Gaza currently has adequate food supplies, the food in Gaza will run out, and the pressure, on all sides and from all sides, to avoid mass starvation will mount to an irresistible level. The fighting may go on for months,at an appalling and tragic cost, but it will come to an end. Peace, not only desirable and essential but inevitable, will come.</div><div><br /></div><div>A permanent peace, rather than a pause in the violence accompanied by the continuing threat of more violence and crimes against humanity, will have to not only find a way to end the violence, but to do justice. Doing justice will inevitably mean reckoning with the expulsion of the Palestinians at the founding of Israel, the Nakba, and it seems likely that reckoning with the Nakba will prove impossible without reckoning with its roots in centuries of European antisemitism, capped with the mass murder of the European Jewish community.<br /></div><div> </div><div>The industrial mass murder machine of Nazi Germany inflicted the worst of its harms on its intended victims: the Jewish and Slavic communities. It also inflicted less direct harms on many other peoples and communities. In particular, a large part of the cost of dealing with the aftermath of this horror fell on the Palestinian community, whose members lost land, homes, families, and stability. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Refugees have, in principle, a right to return to the homes they have been displaced from by war or disaster. As Gwynne Dyer observed, not allowing refugees to return constitutes ethnic cleansing. In modern day Palestine, the number of current residents plus the number of people with a theoretical right of return would overwhelm the available resources: land, water, and infrastructure. This creates an extreme difficulty for any just peace settlement. One proposal often floated to remove this obstacle would replace the right of return for all but a few with a right to compensation. Such compensation would not only provide an economic boost to the Palestinian diaspora; it would also make a clear ethical statement: the people of Western Asia do not have, and never had, the principal responsibility for dealing with the effects of systematic mass murder a continent away from them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some of the compensation for Palestinian losses should come from those who benefited from the land and resource seizures following the foundation of Israel; some of it should come from countries that turned their backs on Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the years before the war, but a substantial, and painful, share ought to come from the inheritors of responsibility for that industrial mass murder.</div><div><br /></div><div>This may well prove more painful, and more controversial, than a brief to the courts in the Hague. However, it would also indicate the Germans mean what they say about their sense of obligation stemming from the atrocities of the past century. <br /><br /><br /></div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-34166849085173756422024-01-14T09:58:00.005-05:002024-01-14T09:58:59.624-05:00Tomoyuki Yamashita would like a word...<p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH8fNownst88o9YInpBBPkOKi-zl_4HOOHTB2jWZ5bjAPnBNh_DN_HVF8S0IcyvWRRTQgpZUJHEi3ZhpPxZeAP7VT5aiV39yNUVIJCLP5UJTn-0lxQANo3Nj7up8vidurE6xd-VvJD1mgFNBAoLicY9XAtmEKRuJjz5yjeeNY5ZvShvzjkn9Xr7A/s479/Face_detail,_Yamashita_Tomoyuki_Osaka_(cropped).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Face_detail, Yamashita Tomoyuki Osaka (cropped)" border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="381" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH8fNownst88o9YInpBBPkOKi-zl_4HOOHTB2jWZ5bjAPnBNh_DN_HVF8S0IcyvWRRTQgpZUJHEi3ZhpPxZeAP7VT5aiV39yNUVIJCLP5UJTn-0lxQANo3Nj7up8vidurE6xd-VvJD1mgFNBAoLicY9XAtmEKRuJjz5yjeeNY5ZvShvzjkn9Xr7A/w255-h320/Face_detail,_Yamashita_Tomoyuki_Osaka_(cropped).jpg" title="Unknown Japanese Army Photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="255" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">General Tomoyuki Yamashita</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> Recently, Jonathan Cook published a substack <a href="https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/hamas-mass-rape-claim-lacks-evidence">essay</a>, in which he questioned the evidence for widespread <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hamas-sex-crimes-israel-war-1.7079535">sexual violence</a> associated with the Hamas breakout from Gaza on October 7. In his essay, he makes the following extraordinary statement:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarised situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviours towards women in western societies in general.</p><p style="text-align: left;">First, it should go without saying: nothing justifies genocide. Those who believe the Israeli government, or apologists for Israel, have alleged sexual violence against Hamas to justify genocide or even ethnic cleansing in Gaza need to respond on principle: nothing justifies crimes against humanity. Nothing Hamas fighters did on October 7 justifies intentionally harming or killing the children of Gaza. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Second: allegations of war crimes matter. They matter because of what Sr. Helen Prejean called the basic human solidarity against suffering and death. They matter because without investigation and accountability they will happen more often.They matter especially when people we might otherwise sympathize with stand accused, because if our solidarity depends on a political test it means nothing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally: if you let loose armed fighters on a civilian population, you own what they do. The American government hanged the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita on exactly that basis, and his fate has haunted more than one military commander since, with good reason. Our rules and standards for warfare exist to make resort to violence harder and less appealing, and to offer the maximum protection to uninvolved and unarmed persons caught up in a conflict.</p><p style="text-align: left;">We do not need to accept allegations of rape and sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 without scrutiny, but neither should we dismiss them. Standards of human rights and human decency must apply to all of us, or they will come to apply to none of us. <br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-68385547031367930242024-01-13T01:39:00.003-05:002024-01-13T01:40:54.982-05:00Friends like these<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqTrfVvkDyhjEhcCo7627ai1RhGL4C1B5jyLPhSma7N61yqbO9OGfoltuXr3MS6MbnYBUr2C7mz3cUyjHe9HnTQOWKVt7TbSnq5LfkBoQ8RG_Z1uEc2zBzDULE6miGvItjR_5dkCyMICR9cGC87l_6yYLdryPS9d7Xhcz-Fzym9eQjidOpjKVQwA/s1714/Daniel's_vision_of_the_four_beasts_from_the_sea_and_the_Ancient_of_Days_-_Silos_Apocalypse_(1109),_f.240_-_BL_Add_MS_11695.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Daniel chapter 7, verses 2-10. Daniel's vision of the four beasts from the sea and the Ancient of Days" border="0" data-original-height="1714" data-original-width="1059" height="119" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqTrfVvkDyhjEhcCo7627ai1RhGL4C1B5jyLPhSma7N61yqbO9OGfoltuXr3MS6MbnYBUr2C7mz3cUyjHe9HnTQOWKVt7TbSnq5LfkBoQ8RG_Z1uEc2zBzDULE6miGvItjR_5dkCyMICR9cGC87l_6yYLdryPS9d7Xhcz-Fzym9eQjidOpjKVQwA/w74-h119/Daniel's_vision_of_the_four_beasts_from_the_sea_and_the_Ancient_of_Days_-_Silos_Apocalypse_(1109),_f.240_-_BL_Add_MS_11695.jpg" title="Creator: Petrus Author joint authorship; Beatus of Liébana; Dominicus" width="74" /></a></div> Recently, Barbara Kay published an <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/barbara-kay-the-christian-organization-that-is-a-true-friend-of-israel-s/ar-AA1lYf61" rel="nofollow">opinion piece</a> praising the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, calling the organization a "true friend of Israel". <p></p><p>Israel does have friends, and quite possibly many supporters of the International Christian Embassy have the best possible intentions for Israel, Israeli citizens, and the wider Jewish community. However, by no means do all so-called "Christian" "Zionists" have the best interests of Israel in mind.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>A significant fraction of the Christian supporters of Israel believe in a <a href="https://dokumen.pub/allies-for-armageddon-9780300177077.html" rel="nofollow">specific theology</a> of the end of humanity and the second coming of Christ, developed mostly in Protestant sects since the seventeenth century. This doctrine argues believers who interpret the prophecies in the Bible correctly can predict the second coming, despite Jesus's plain statement about the impossibility of doing so. Although they do not always say so, the advocacy of so-called "Christian Zionists" who hold these views go further in practice: what they attempt to understand and predict, they also make an effort to control. They take various actions in an attempt to hasten the apocalypse, including supporting specific expansionist Israeli policies.<br /></p><p>Needless to say, the end times these Christian Zionists anticipate take place according to Christian scriptures, and the Jewish community fares no better at the second coming of Jesus than in the Islamic end times envisioned by Hamas. In the end envisioned by believers in the specific interpretation of prophesy affirmed by the evangelical "end times" movement, the Jewish people end up consigned to the fire with all other unsaved people, aside from a few rescued by prompt conversion.</p><p>Religious Jews who see the expansion of Israel to the whole of the West Bank in spiritual terms, have no reason for concern about Christian predictions or illusions. Indeed, what self proclaimed Christian prophets have to say need not concern believers in Judaism unless Jewish people, or the state of Israel, form friendships based on these predictions. A relationship in which each party uses the other seems a strange and toxic substitute for true friendship. In the partnership between the members of the Jewish community and end-times Christians, each expects the other will suffer disappointment, if not disaster.<br /></p><p>In fact, the people of Israel do not have a truly symmetrical relationship with the evangelical end times movement. The expansion and land seizure policies the evangelicals promote in order to fulfill their particular interpretation of scripture carry real costs. The heaviest of these costs: lives, moral injury, alienation from their neighbours, fall on Israeli Jews. </p><p>The Jewish people can do better for friends than this. <br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-38704603290286746352024-01-08T07:56:00.006-05:002024-01-13T04:06:52.066-05:00Trauma informed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiegCjxN1vCzsQrPWD7cIIMuKha2GC9Ru8x0S2XtpW_w4e4Uzp6WTsdic9jwv3RGAC_vu3Fur8d2rdpvaCKkL2JxZVpHtq0ctznIuezxGxUaRRa6XBTJdg2X4cKt9UJh1motSOf_bJE0iJzBCNHd2pNnjVpg7y9Ty2OFEIE_kruRWjqFvxuVoySZw/s777/Auschwitz_Entrance_2006.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="777" data-original-width="512" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiegCjxN1vCzsQrPWD7cIIMuKha2GC9Ru8x0S2XtpW_w4e4Uzp6WTsdic9jwv3RGAC_vu3Fur8d2rdpvaCKkL2JxZVpHtq0ctznIuezxGxUaRRa6XBTJdg2X4cKt9UJh1motSOf_bJE0iJzBCNHd2pNnjVpg7y9Ty2OFEIE_kruRWjqFvxuVoySZw/w132-h200/Auschwitz_Entrance_2006.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><p><br />The image carries a meaning in a way very few others do.A squat tower with an ill proportioned and ugly railway gate, it serves as an instantly recognizable shorthand and an indelible stain on the history of our civilization. In the history of past five hundred years, an age of endless empire, of ever more destructive wars and increasingly empowered hatreds, this one image in all its meanings occupies a unique place. This gate opens onto a killing machine capable of efficiently carrying out a million murders, a large proportion of more than six million murders in the four years between the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin. Together, the murder and enslavement beyond this gate created the index trauma of our time. We measure other crimes, other catastrophes, and other horrors against this one.</p><p> </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>Over the last century, we have increasingly come to understand understand the effect of trauma and the consequences of mass violence. We have certainly had no shortage of examples to study. We know trauma experienced by parents affects their children and even grandchildren, and indeed we have an expression to describe this effect: inter-generational trauma. We have seen how memories of abuse, passed down, colour the way many of us see the world. We have seen how residential schools and the "sixties scoop" have lingering effects on Canada's relations with Indigenous nations, how memories of exploitation, from slavery to Jim Crow, poison trust in institutions from criminal justice to medicine for many African Americans. Indeed the word "trauma" has emerged as something of a touchstone for many on the Left, an instant answer and rebuke to anyone who asks why oppressed peoples do not flourish within the structures of the dominant culture.</p><p>Somehow, on October 7 of last year, too many people appear to have made no effort whatever to apply their understandings of trauma, both personal and inter-generational. I have read a great deal of commentary from the Left calling for justice in the wake of October 7. Some writings celebrated the breaking of the Gaza fence as an act of liberation. I have seen a great many comments and demonstrations affirming the rights of the Palestinian people, and deploring the extraordinary violence of the Israeli retaliation against Hamas. I have also seen my share of writings attempting to justify Hamas. I have listened for an effort to address the effects of a fresh slaughter on ordinary Jewish people still dealing with the inter-generational trauma of the holocaust, and I have heard, and seen, very little.<br /></p><p>To begin with the beginning: trauma means suffering, and ignoring other people's trauma compounds their suffering. We shouldn't do it. If dealing with other people's pain means complicating our political position, accept the complication. If anyone needs another reason to address the violence of October 7 in the context of inter-generational trauma, not to do so makes for an ineffective deescalation technique. Individuals who feel forsaken and rejected have more reason to resort to violence, and less incentive to respond to appeals. If anyone needs a reason to do the work of cultivating empathy for the Jewish community, where we live and in Israel/Palestine, the children of Gaza and, in the long run, all the children of Southwestern Asia will pay the price for continuing war. <br /></p><p><br /><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-46724148301810531002024-01-05T22:31:00.001-05:002024-01-08T07:59:21.654-05:00...by omission<p>Last entry I wrote about my frustration at having no outlet during a time of even greater global turmoil than usual: the first major war in Europe during my lifetime, renewed war in Southwest Asia (aka the "Middle East"), and looming over everything, global climate change. In the current round of crises, and in particularly the outbreak of war in Southwest Asia, so much remains unsaid, so many problems seem to me to have gone without a mention, I just feel a need to speak, if only to say things I think obvious.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><br /><p></p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnkskf3p2AG2hVJ8x8KEW49fILzL-7Qc-iyDPSj-lJsYhTbqTv8w_B28dvPoUcVZ4VKlefYi0yN138Rh-rpZ6yvMlbz-xS2ac9C-VoBxi3KRHwO-08kLfyIy7x7ZDlwAzvRliDo0EX_09ZtnyTuCy5bktrzBGX0tiEXh0EkvJP8DyXDu-hpXZk3Q/s1212/2024-01-05-01.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Line drawing, Abraham preparing to scarifice Isaac, with Abrahamic religious symbols overlaid." border="0" data-original-height="1212" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnkskf3p2AG2hVJ8x8KEW49fILzL-7Qc-iyDPSj-lJsYhTbqTv8w_B28dvPoUcVZ4VKlefYi0yN138Rh-rpZ6yvMlbz-xS2ac9C-VoBxi3KRHwO-08kLfyIy7x7ZDlwAzvRliDo0EX_09ZtnyTuCy5bktrzBGX0tiEXh0EkvJP8DyXDu-hpXZk3Q/w238-h320/2024-01-05-01.png" title="Abrahamic religious symbols by Szczepan1990 Sacrifice of Isaac by Agostino Veneziano (1490–1540), scan by Metropolitan museum of art" width="238" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The sacrifice of Isaac<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>I live in Canada as a Canadian citizen. like my parents and their parents before me. I write this from Toronto, Canada's biggest city. Certainly, not every person approves of my place of residence, or perhaps even my existence. I live where I do and the way I do at least partly out of a history of white privilege and settler colonialism. We live in an age of social media, of thought reduced to sound bites and
messages of a few hundred words, and in this environment we all live, to
some degree at least, a contested life. The jagged edges of the
truncated thoughts and irrational certainties our means of communication
promote leave no lives a completely clear space.<p></p><p>If I lived in Jerusalem, whatever my ethnicity, origin, or beliefs. my existence would represent a hope of redemption to millions of people, and an intolerable obstacle to the divine purpose to millions of others. The vast majority of us do not live in places where the doctrines, hope, fears, and profoundly fraught histories of the three Abrahamic religions collide. That small slice of Southwestern Asia, roughly between the Jordan River Valley and the Mediterranean coast does not simply carry the burdens of a complex history; millions of people around the world have a deep attachment to its fate. <br /></p><p>Different people will have profoundly different reactions to this reality, from profound indifference, to disgust for people who hold religious views, to passionate engagement on one side or another. Whatever we feel about the situation, it will do us no good, and at best simply waste time, to press for ordinary political solutions to the conflicts over this land without addressing the religious hopes, the history, and the fears millions of people, both within and without the contested land itself, bring to this conflict. For that reason, a appeals to logic and morality we might expect to work in other conflicts have less effect here. Parties striving toward a spiritual goal do not merely refuse to respond to secular restraints; religious teachings, Christian among them, often hold up defiance of secular authority for religious goals as one of the highest forms of the good.</p><p>Politics has few more irritating, and few less helpful, phrases than "why don't they just..." Individuals and communities have reasons for the things they do, the things they don't do, and for not "just" solving problems ways some of us think they should. When the reasons for a conflict arise out of well known religious feelings, traditions, and histories, it makes even less sense to ignore them.</p><p><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-72737776526103203702024-01-04T08:04:00.002-05:002024-01-04T08:04:57.623-05:00Here we go again...<p>Whether or not it makes sense to pick up this web log again after over two years with no posts, I'm going to.</p><p>I have stopped posting on twitter; the present owner has expressed a foul antisemitism and I don't want to do any unpaid work to make him any wealthier. That has left me with no outlet for most of a very frustrating 2023, and since everyone I read promises an even more frustrating and frightening ride for 2024, I expect I will need someplace to write about what I see and feel and think. </p><p>So... Open Hand, Open Eye might just come alive again for anyone interested in reading it. <br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-42254968462757683722021-06-01T19:04:00.000-04:002021-06-01T19:04:32.270-04:00William of Occam<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/William_of_Ockham_-_Logica_1341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Sketch of William of Occam, from a manuscipt of Ockham's Summa Logicae" border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="400" height="186" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/William_of_Ockham_-_Logica_1341.jpg" title="from a manuscipt of Ockham's Summa Logicae, MS Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 464/571, fol. 69" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William of Occam</td></tr></tbody></table> The intellectual asceticism of William of Occam is not popular in American conservative circles. The American commentator Rod Dreher has extended his dislike for Occam's antinomianism into a distaste for the rule against multiplying causes known as Occam's Razor. Plenty of conservatives who do not often refer to William of Occam by name refuse, in practice, to apply his insight. <br /></p><p>Occam's Razor provides a central insight in all forms of intellectual endeavour, but nowhere does it matter more than in the formation of policy, because in politics the facts and the logical conclusions from these facts matter most when they come with bad, or at least unwelcome, news. Facts always matter, but when they happen to align with our desires, they have only a marginal influence on policy. After all, we seldom turn from doing something we want to do because the facts and logic affirm our choices. Living by the truth only really counts as a virtue when it includes a willingness to live by truths we find unpleasant.</p><p>Occam's Razor plays a vital role in this process, by cutting down the number of conclusions possible from any given set of facts. If I write a computer program and the test runs keep providing the wrong output, I can conclude I have made an error somewhere in my logic, or I can decide the operating system has an arcane defect my program has somehow stumbled into, a system error capable of evading detection for decades, and one invoked by only the tiniest set of circumstances. While such things happen, Occam's Razor tells me to start looking for errors in my own work. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>Mollie Hemmingway recently announced her intention to write a book about the 2020 election in an <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/11/mollie-hemingway-is-writing-the-2020-election-book-the-media-dont-want-you-to-read/">article</a> in First Things. In it, she pretty clearly repeats the now current line among Trump supporting Republicans: if the Democrats did not actually steal the election, a great many influential people, particularly in both traditional and new media, worked very hard to slant the information provided about the election.</p><p>In fact, the media, both old and new, did work hard to assure the public of the fairness of the election. A great many media outlets and writers, including a respectable proportion of conservative writers, did condemn President Trump's behaviour and record. Donald Trump did lose the election to President Biden. </p><p>The factual background for these events is well known and difficult to dispute. Ms. Hemmingway's arguments ignore some facts, but more than that, she posits, or more often implies, some very complicated causes for simple effects. Through the past two elections campaigns, Donald Trump proclaimed, loudly, he would not accept any outcome other than a win by himself. When he did win the electoral college in 2016, he blamed widespread fraud for his substantial loss in the popular vote. Add in the inevitable disruptions caused by a global pandemic, and people who care about democracy had a very clear and simple set of reasons to promote clarity in the reporting of election results, and a corresponding effort to answer and to filter out untruths. A Time <a href="https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/">report</a> Ms. Hemmingway quotes claims an informal group of media and other business executives, political operatives, and activists came together to do just that. How much the peaceful conduct of the election is due to the common sense of most Americans, and how much to well timed messaging we will probably never know; a coordinated effort to save an election makes a better story than the solid common sense of the public.</p><p>We need little explanation for most aspects of the 2020 election. A once in a century pandemic serves to explain the changes to the election procedures. Donald Trump's persistent unpopularity, and his personal and political failures more than suffice to explain his failure to win reelection. He never won a majority of the popular vote, which makes him the first president in a century to never win a majority. His mingling of business interests and public resources provoked continual ethical and legal questions. His administration committed moral monstrosities, such as the separation of families at the border. He failed to carry out any of his promises. In two years in which Republicans controlled the legislature and the judiciary, Trump achieved a tax cut for billionaires. The improved replacement for the Affordable Care Act never materialized, and the flat out repeal the Republicans attempted failed in Congress. The Mexicans never paid a cent for the wall, and despite Mr. Trump's fiscal maneuvers to fund it, the United States built little in the way of an actual barrier. The infrastructure program the Republicans promised never appeared.</p><p>When Donald Trump faced his great test as president, he failed completely. He not only failed to prepare for a pandemic, he dismantled preparations his predecessors had left him. When the pandemic broke out, he did everything he could to keep the inflated stock market he evidently saw as a key to his reelection. He failed to coordinate the procurement of emergency supplies, failed to implement effective restrictions, but above all he failed, in any sense, to lead. He ended up leaving the economy in shambles, a population profoundly divided, and a death toll twice that of the nearest industrialized country. </p><p>Given that sorry record, it seems astonishing Mr. Trump got as many votes as he did. Yet Ms. Hemmingway does not discuss the actual failures of the Trump Administration. Instead, she claims "The story of how these institutions worked to rig the 2020 results needs to be told, and I plan to tell it." In order to make this argument, she must logically discount the evidence of Donald Trump's failures, although her claims the "political, media, and corporate establishments... manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked the violent racial unrest..." suggests she does not so much dismiss it but displace it. That requires another failure to recognize the sufficiency of evidence. We saw, in real time, Donald Trump's fumbling with the pandemic, his failure to take responsibility, his grasping, literally, at "magic". These failures in leadership explain the outcome of Covid-19 in the United States, with no need for an intervention by any "establishment". Likewise the underlying tensions caused by the pandemic as it hit poor people, and in particular racialized poor people, much harder than the wealthy, sparked by the egregiously brutal murder of George Floyd, more than serve to explain the protests of the summer of 2020. Occam's Razor applies here: we can see clearly the causes for the unrest and the political and economic failures of 2020. If anyone did engage in a conspiracy, it's pretty clear they need not have bothered.</p><p>All the documented facts about Donald Trump's troubled term explain not only the widespread and energetic efforts to defeat him, they also, equally well, to explain the his rejection by what Ms. Hemmingway calls "political, media, and corporate establishments". Plenty of individuals and institutions, including conservative ones, rejected Mr. Trump. Many news outlets reported Mr. Trump's failures in unflattering terms. People on both the left and the right expressed their conviction he does not legitimately represent the American people. His own behaviour, his own failures, suffice to account for this. </p><p>The cost of an undisciplined assignment of blame for Mr. Trump's failures will fall most heavily on the American Conservative movement. Whether American Conservatives and the Republican party end up in the political wilderness as a result of their failures, or whether they succeed in persuading the voters to give them another chance, the failure to confront their failures will mean American Conservatives will continue to make a less coherent and compelling political argument than they otherwise might. </p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-86414936329084466772021-05-21T00:17:00.000-04:002021-05-21T00:18:09.945-04:00Virtue<p>In his <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/">essay</a> "Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell wrote the following passage: </p><blockquote><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjeBzgYaq3eqSPE-Q9NuBN_rr-W9Tg1uXJNFdfqZbZPsEbyY5jn4Ff29fNY65XCgXk_jWL-63HvfsrwO9rHZyKU3Bg3ymtxNV9IdUjRemd9gWyje2GG1NgB7hyphenhyphenp2jFKQmKpwDuhQ/s600/476px-Civic_Virtue_%252850243p%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Civic Virtue, an idealized statue in Green-wood cemetery" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="476" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjeBzgYaq3eqSPE-Q9NuBN_rr-W9Tg1uXJNFdfqZbZPsEbyY5jn4Ff29fNY65XCgXk_jWL-63HvfsrwO9rHZyKU3Bg3ymtxNV9IdUjRemd9gWyje2GG1NgB7hyphenhyphenp2jFKQmKpwDuhQ/w254-h320/476px-Civic_Virtue_%252850243p%2529.jpg" title="Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="254" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Civic Virtue in Green-Wood Cemetery<br />by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rhododendrites" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); color: #0645ad; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.3px; text-align: start; text-decoration-line: none;" title="User:Rhododendrites">Rhododendrites</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, <b>though it contains a partial truth</b>, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the 'change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. (emphasis added)</p></blockquote><p>Orwell's concession of the "partial truth" of the talk of the need for a "change of heart" proceeds naturally from a comment he made in his <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/charles-dickens/">essay</a> about the work of Charles Dickens:</p><blockquote><p>The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens... had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.</p></blockquote><p>Orwell identifies a classic paradox here: how do you make a good society out of human beings with impulses, and in some case a real disposition, to behave badly. The context of these quotes also hints at a solution. In art and literature in religion, in all areas where human beings choose to participate and where we accept our participation may change us, even if we do not necessarily choose to change, we consent to address our inner lives and thoughts, the source from which our behaviour springs. Thus, a writer such as Charles Dickens, or a religious teacher, or a poet, painter or playwright can exhort us to see ourselves and the world in a different way. Religious teachers and artists have the authority to ask us to change the way we think, and in that sense the person we are. Politics, on the other hand, exists to define standards of behaviour we will, if necessary, enforce. Enforcement, in the final analysis, means some form of violence. </p><p>To begin with the principle: the body politic does not have the right to shape its members. Politics stops at my skin. To go on to the practical: as Orwell notes, focus on the individual serves to distract from the real business of politics: putting in place the rules, expectations, and structures we require in order to live together as the people we are, not the people some utopian vision hopes for.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>In practice, this means we ought to resist the utopian dreams of a new kind of human in a regenerate world. We should also, just as strongly, resist conservatives who excuse their resistance to modest, practical changes on the spurious grounds these changes will benefit working class people who behave in "unvirtuous" ways. In fact, when we analyze these two impulses, we often discover they are actually two sides of the same coin. </p><p>By happenstance, this February, Rod Dreher's blog published two comments in succession, illustrating both sides of the problem with the politicization of virtue. </p><p>First, Dreher <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/wanda-lavender-minimum-wage-race-class-family-work/">writes about measures</a> to reduce child poverty, as well as the proposal to hike the minimum wage from its current level to fifteen dollars an hour, or some value sufficient to sustain a family over an average week's work. Dreher expresses concern a government child allowance and a livable minimum wage will degrade the morality of the working class. He cites an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/theres-no-natural-dignity-in-work.html">article</a> by Ezra Klein:</p><blockquote><p>Wanda Lavender lives in Milwaukee. She’s 39, with six children and one grandchild. She used to be a day care teacher and proud of the work. But after a decade, she was still making $9 an hour. She was a single mother by then, and the money wasn’t enough. So she began working at Popeyes, too. She did both jobs for a time, putting in more than 60 hours a week.... I’d met Lavender because she’s organizing for a $15 minimum wage, and she said the experience had been transformative.</p></blockquote><p>Rod Dreher reads Ezra Klein's article, including the account of Ms. Lavender's situation, and responds thus:</p><blockquote><p>But the thing that struck me in reading the lede to Ezra Klein’s piece was: how do you get to be 39 years old, with six children and one grandchild, and no husband in the house?</p></blockquote><p>I'll resist the temptation to list the significant number of ways a woman can end up with children and no husband, but Mr. Dreher has concluded it has something to do with self indulgence or immorality. Indeed, his whole article consists of contradictory comments, expressing an inarticulate and ultimately irrelevant sense of resentment. The question of government supports for children is a matter of justice to the children, who, as Dreher conceded, can't choose their parents. The minimum wage proceeds from a basic proposition related to human dignity: a person's time is their life. To ask, or to force, them to exchange it for a wage too low to permit them a decent life violates their dignity. This concern is not a new one: when St. John of Patmos introduces one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse <a href="https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=483627812">with</a>:</p><blockquote><p>‘A quart of wheat for a day’s pay,<a></a> and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay,<a></a> but do not damage the olive oil and the wine!’ </p></blockquote><p> This often gets interpreted as a reference to famine, but it literally says the standard labourer's wage does not suffice to sustain life. Rod Dreher asks</p><blockquote><p>...whether or not the people who are going to be asked to help the world’s Wandas out by paying more for consumer goods to pay her a $15 minimum wage have a right to expect anything from them.</p></blockquote><p>Of course, corporations paying less than living wages, and people who take advantage of the low prices of goods and services offered by those companies, receive a subsidy from the "Wandas", not the other way around; not to mention the hundreds of people from Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere who toil under conditions we would never accept in order to support our lifestyles. When it comes to people who actually produce goods and services for less than a living wage, George Orwell, John of Patmos and a host of other writers are correct, and Dreher is deeply mistaken: we need a change in the economic system, not a change in hearts. We especially ought not to denigrate the millions of women whose heroic work, both raising children and sustaining the economies we depend on, in far less comfort and with less recognition than they deserve. </p><p>Just a few days later, Rod Dreher writes a very different post, one where, apparently without realizing it, he does a pretty complete about face. He writes about the situation of <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jodi-shaw-smith-college-live-not-by-lies/">Jodi Shaw at Smith College</a>, crediting her with "Living Not by Lies". In his blog post, he relays Shaw's own account of her experience of hectoring at anti-racism training sessions, the about face by an administration, which she claims thwarted a project of some importance to her career. I see no need to treat all Ms. Shaw's claims as certain or true in order to appreciate the imbalance, and indeed the irony, of an elite institution addressing structural inequalities by requiring their least powerful employees to participate in "trainings". I have an extreme skepticism of any attempt to meld politics with notions of therapy or personal improvement, but you don't need my skepticism to wonder whether these trainings make much difference to the actual problems they purport to address. Consider the status of Smith College, an elite institution tasked with, among other things, providing credentials for admission to the upper levels of economic opportunity in one of the most unequal nations, in one of the most unequal epochs of history. Even without my mistrust of the therapeutic, Orwell's comment about the privileged favouring a change in hearts over a change in economic systems appears to fit this case pretty neatly.</p><p>In the larger sense, it makes sense to have, at the very least, reservations about the promotion of virtue as a solution to social problems. While a decent society inevitably depends on the willingness of its member to conform to structures designed to promote decency, it still makes more sense to guide behaviour than to attempt to mold character. As Ralph Nader once put it, if you want drivers to not get into collisions because their brakes lock up, installing anti-lock braking systems works better than trying to drill all drivers in braking techniques. </p><p><br /></p><br />John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-61285841264198301192021-02-25T02:32:00.000-05:002021-02-25T02:32:34.989-05:00Thinking About the Rule of Law<p> When Rudolph Giuliani called for a "trial by combat" on January 6, his hearers probably did not envision the ancient Germanic judicial ritual. Indeed, to judge from the number of supporters of the "Q" conspiracy theory attending the rally where he spoke, his call for "trial by combat" probably evoked, in at least some of his hearers, an imagined reckoning which, had it taken place, would have resembled the baptismal scene in "The Godfather", with Donald Trump reciting the oath of office as his surrogates systematically slaughtered his enemies. This displays a profound detachment from the rule of law; paradoxically, it also illustrates the importance of the rule of law. The Godfather movies chronicle the profound tragedy of a man drawn into a corrupt and violent system despite his intentions, and the baptism scene in that movie vividly illustrates, in its hypocrisy, the corruption behind the violence. To imagine a similar scene as a triumphant vindication, as the believers in "Q" appear to have done, with Donald Trump beginning his second term with a mass hanging following a military coup and unlawful tribunals represents a catastrophic corruption of the American imagination. </p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Pf8BkFLBRw" width="560"></iframe><span></span><span><br /><br /></span><div><span><a name='more'></a></span><span>The civility and prosperity of the United States rest on the rule of law. I doubt the Americans who chafe at Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter when they enforce terms of service under the law would like to live in a country where private militias operated with no legal restraints. Indeed, I honestly doubt most Americans who wave "Q" flags have any understanding of what life in the lawless imagined future of the "Q" fantasy would really be like. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div>The outbreak of contempt for the rule of law we saw in the US capitol last month has many origins, not least the conduct of courts through the ages. For every Brown v. Board of Education, court records contain a Plessy v. Ferguson and a Dred Scott v. Stanford. For every Nuremburg tribunal, history records a clutch of Stalinist show trials or a national socialist Volksgerichtshof (people's court). Courts, as human institutions, human political institutions, have as dark a record as any. Before we rush to defend the rule of law as an institution, we have a question to answer: on what grounds does it make sense to trust the courts?</div><div><br /></div><div>The courts can only serve the society that exists, and rule on the laws an existing society passes. Penning a constitution defining Black people as two fifths of a human will lead to Dred Scott and Plessy. The respect we show the courts arises not from the many occasions they reflect the vices of our society all too well, but from the moments they reach into the deep well of principle all good societies rest on, and render positive decisions, ones which lead rather than follow. As a corollary, the moral authority of the courts, as with any symbol having value, invites counterfeiting by the unscrupulous. Gangsters from Hitler to Stalin adorn their stooges with robes and proclaim them judges, and the sites of their hearings courts, but the Volksgerichtshof or the Moscow Trials provided only a crude pastiche of the dignity, discipline, and search for truth we associate with the rule of law.</div><div><br /></div><div>While the idea of an "ideal" court may seem like a classic "no true Scotsman" fallacy, criteria for comparing an existing court, and indeed an existing legal system, to the ideal exist. Impartiality, honesty, and consistency define a good court and a working legal system. No court or system of laws ever fully reaches these ideals, but when the courts aspire to them, and when those aspirations guide court decisions, they add great value to society.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is logical and prudent for us to accept judicial decisions we disagree with unless we can prove the courts made them in bad faith. Equally, though, when decisions contradict beliefs we cherish, finding the good faith in them takes work many people will not agree to do. Some of the conservatives appalled by the assault on the capitol had argued for supporting Donald Trump's presidency because of the judges he appointed; a transactional approach to the rule of law, in which the "right" people can get the "right" decisions by appointing the "right" judges. Unfortunately, behind this attitude lies the assumption the courts do not exist to seek the truth in an impartial manner, but function as just another political body, another arm of the state. This approach robs the institutions of law and justice of one of their most important functions: as one of the few fora in our society dedicated to finding the truth. Science, medicine, and law all seek for the truth using rigorous procedures and applying a code of ethics. We saw the effect of this in Mr. Trump's court cases, where the former president's lawyers made claims in press conferences they did not present in court. While we do not know for sure, it seems at least possible the penalties for lying in court prevented the more absurd of the Republican campaign's theories from coming before the bench, although some of the more absurd theories about the election have drawn actions for libel.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plenty of commentators have described the former president's attitude to truth telling, from the image of a firehose spewing lies, to the more sedate but more chilling phrase "post truth". As long as the courts and the legal process retain their place as a haven for the ideal of the truth as a shared ground where people, even people who disagree profoundly or dislike one another deeply can meet, we have some hope for a civilized society. Without that, we risk fragmenting onto small groups, each with our own truth, each aiming to impose it on the other through means ranging from clever psychological manipulation to outright armed force. </div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-84046265949981197392021-02-19T19:34:00.003-05:002021-02-19T19:34:50.318-05:00Peter Pan's Crocodile and Donald Trump<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkqlx1S463geo3dowfebVZAIVBDmomBCO_EilKX8CzLMZRxVM7LlhV9UwZZ2QAxNlIYrkxmSL8Ul6wWqhNUZBsX-C8L8wI_BHrAczQ2gU4vzJNHjz79HPcaYdOvCgZupz3ip1CZw/s869/Peter_pan_crocodile.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="757" data-original-width="869" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkqlx1S463geo3dowfebVZAIVBDmomBCO_EilKX8CzLMZRxVM7LlhV9UwZZ2QAxNlIYrkxmSL8Ul6wWqhNUZBsX-C8L8wI_BHrAczQ2gU4vzJNHjz79HPcaYdOvCgZupz3ip1CZw/s320/Peter_pan_crocodile.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Many years ago I heard a theatre legend, one of many such stories, in which a young and cocky actor playing the crocodile in <i style="text-align: left;">Peter Pan</i> managed to infuriate the stagehands. In crocodile costume, of course, he walked bent over, following tape on the stage, and one night, after a particularly egregious offence against the stage crew, he followed the tape, tick tocking away... straight into the orchestra pit.<p></p><p></p><p>The usual message for this story for actors is: don't piss off the stage crew. It also has a message for politicians and pundits: don't blindly follow the tape. In politics, of course, the tape we follow has many names and takes many forms: peer pressure, compromise or the allure of power. More dangerously, the tape we follow takes the shape of a phenomenon visible throughout politics and society: a series of minor propositions, each of which we may not want to agree to, but which at the time seem less painful than a sense of letting the team down, or losing friends, access, and influence. C. S. Lewis described this process in his great essay <a href="https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/">The Inner Ring</a>.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Riot_police_and_protester_outside_United_States_Capitol_at_evening_20210106.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Rioters at the storming of the US Capitol confront police, Jan 6 2021" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Riot_police_and_protester_outside_United_States_Capitol_at_evening_20210106.jpg" title="Rioters confront police, Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Storming the Capitol, by Tyler Merble</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Over the past three months, a large number of American conservatives have followed Donald Trump's lost election over the edge of the stage. Starting at the point the crocodile toppled off the stage, the assault on Congress and its immediate aftermath, we can divide Republicans' reaction to this final cap on the Trump campaign's effort to overturn the election into three rough classes. The first class contains those who have decided to let Donald Trump's pronouncements define their reality: if he says he won by "a lot", they dismiss media reports as "fake", and court decisions as "technicalities". For the second class, some action of Donald Trump's, whether before his election or on the day of the attack on Congress, went too far. They have, often to the loud disappointment of members of the first group, drawn a firm line. This group includes conservatives such as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/us/politics/adam-kinzinger-republicans-trump.html">Adam Kinzinger</a>, for whom the assault on the capitol represented the red line, and David Frum, who has always viewed the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump as a threat to American conservatism. The third, and in some ways the most interesting Republicans and conservatives, do not buy into the most florid conspiracy theories. Indeed, they renounce them. But at the same time, they manage to suggest, around the edges, Joe Biden's victory carries a taint of something they do not appear to define precisely or credibly. Consider <a href="https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/02/13/trump-acquitted/">this post</a> by the blog "neoneocon", in which the author praises Trump's acquittal and disparages his accusers, without actually venturing an opinion on the central issue, namely, whether Trump's supporters had just cause for their assault on Congress. Consider, also, the way Fr. Dwight Longenecker <a href="https://dwightlongenecker.com/conspiracy-what-conspiracy/">addresses conspiracy theories</a> around the election: <p></p><blockquote><p>Did this globalist establishment see Donald Trump with his “America First” agenda as the main obstacle to their plans? Again–this is not a secret. For four years they did everything possible to get rid of him. Did they work together to rig an election to make sure he was finally thrown out? Here we must look for balance and ask for facts. The problem is, the establishment seem intent not to investigate the irregularities in the election. Senator Rand Paul and others are calling for the anomalies to be investigated without claiming that they wish to overturn the election of Biden and without extravagant conspiracy claims.</p></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTvbnw1JO75GL4tfRtq_3S7zreWC2DGan4XbymM5hkt8j5ndxoG8cgSM8H-7kn9kzqbeD8m7aQt-HnRLcUX-xRL9x1KRkdBGA7eAMBdPCgWIIkMF_OoRd2OrhEu9dEYBpmNZk5eA/s160/Jan_6_05.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Accused participant(s) in the assault on Congress" border="0" data-original-height="84" data-original-width="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTvbnw1JO75GL4tfRtq_3S7zreWC2DGan4XbymM5hkt8j5ndxoG8cgSM8H-7kn9kzqbeD8m7aQt-HnRLcUX-xRL9x1KRkdBGA7eAMBdPCgWIIkMF_OoRd2OrhEu9dEYBpmNZk5eA/s16000/Jan_6_05.png" title="Assault on Congress, taken from an FBI Request for Information, Public Domain, no author information" /></a></div>This passage assumes the existence of "irregularities" and "anomalies" in the election, an assertion disputed by experts in the Homeland Security department, members of a team headed by a Trump appointee. It also glosses over a couple of facts: for example, the State of Georgia counted ballots <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/politics/georgia-recount-recertification-biden/index.html">three times</a>, and the Secretary of State did not certify the results until completing a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55006188">full hand recount</a> of every ballot. Sixty courts examined cases the Trump Campaign's lawyers brought. If an "intent not to investigate" looks like that, I can only assume elections subjected to serious scrutiny would never end. <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj18Z6nFsge39ImOg16eQvZCyJUoBUca1ccu4rJKpMEwGxeib-fowjCfo5mbIlsd2GskeHg7Cp6PatJKmIggBcPMNpZ5gFVFtTDHL5-HWKszNnBa8DeW8M7t1d98lev-YE9z4eluw/s136/Jan_6_01.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Accused participant(s) in the assault on Congress" border="0" data-original-height="136" data-original-width="71" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj18Z6nFsge39ImOg16eQvZCyJUoBUca1ccu4rJKpMEwGxeib-fowjCfo5mbIlsd2GskeHg7Cp6PatJKmIggBcPMNpZ5gFVFtTDHL5-HWKszNnBa8DeW8M7t1d98lev-YE9z4eluw/s16000/Jan_6_01.png" title="Assault on Congress, taken from an FBI Request for Information, Public Domain, no author information" /></a></div><br />To return to the metaphor, the first group corresponds to an actor who trusts the tape on the stage implicitly, or who wants to go into the pit, adding a drastic coda to their performance. The second group either senses from the beginning the tape leads in a bad direction, or sees, in the end, the lip of the stage, and sheers off. The final group understands the tape may not provide perfect guidance. They will admit it veers too close to the edge, but somehow, to refuse to follow it, to stand up and walk off the stage; that they cannot find it in themselves to do. They appear to want to find a way to accept the guidance of the tape but not to fall into the pit. <div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCE1Z5rxm_ttuMhdI9kcYmd0kW5LHh-y72CQrHBuNoUXqiGl3QvVLfl1Jo4W1QVzdlojxKApugH-IipOLCDtltWGF45T_dHa-LyoZlQsVRoFyt8xDY0seqScf1dt8AqVOXarycg/s174/Jan_6_08.png" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><img alt="Accused participant(s) in the assault on Congress" border="0" data-original-height="137" data-original-width="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCE1Z5rxm_ttuMhdI9kcYmd0kW5LHh-y72CQrHBuNoUXqiGl3QvVLfl1Jo4W1QVzdlojxKApugH-IipOLCDtltWGF45T_dHa-LyoZlQsVRoFyt8xDY0seqScf1dt8AqVOXarycg/s16000/Jan_6_08.png" title="Assault on Congress, taken from an FBI Request for Information, Public Domain, no author information" /></a></div>But this case, as in many cases of moral and political choice, allows no middle way. The tape leads over the edge of the stage and into the pit. The actor either follows it and falls, or they don't. For a political conservative in the United States, paramount values include democracy and the rule of law. The entire edifice of American society, from its politics of ordered liberty to its economy of consent and contract, rests on these principles. The assault on Congress, as it sat to ratify the election, violated both of these principles. Many people have written about the way an attempt to overturn an election by force contradicts democratic principles, somewhat fewer about its subversion of the rule of law. The Trump Campaign filed sixty court cases seeking to undo the vote. They lost each one, including a respectable number of cases argued in front of conservative Republican judges, some of them appointed by Donald Trump himself. Attacking the Capitol meant choosing to resort to force in order to undo the sixty court judgements in these cases, to reject out of hand the possibility the courts may have ruled with integrity, based on facts or wisdom Trump's supporters may not possess. Even more fundamentally, it rejects the social contract required by the rule of law: the commitment of all parties to abide by the court's decision when they deeply disagree with it, even when a decision goes against their most fundamental interests. C. S. Lewis described courage as all virtues at the testing point, meaning the point of highest reality, and the same principle applies to the rule of law. A society in which people whom a judicial decision angers can use violence to overturn it does not truly live under the rule of law.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42m6Qds-7ka3_UVIgKJdV_Iwuj2BZT_Wcq9tGk4QqQzEaUxxvSs4RfG34kjxTsNJGdcNP1tuQQyIJCo1RgYpMkSDE7EBMdVmO-OIB1FPIRLrhqxSrsVm0-4K9lcjy8hHwCKcgZg/s181/Jan_6_02.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Accused participant(s) in the assault on Congress" border="0" data-original-height="125" data-original-width="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42m6Qds-7ka3_UVIgKJdV_Iwuj2BZT_Wcq9tGk4QqQzEaUxxvSs4RfG34kjxTsNJGdcNP1tuQQyIJCo1RgYpMkSDE7EBMdVmO-OIB1FPIRLrhqxSrsVm0-4K9lcjy8hHwCKcgZg/s16000/Jan_6_02.png" title="Assault on Congress, taken from an FBI Request for Information, Public Domain, no author information" /></a></div>Republicans who back Donald Trump unequivocally have made their choice: he, or his policies, or what he represents, matter more to them than democracy or the rule of law. They have abandoned American political conservatism, any effort or even pretense at conserving the American polity and its principles, in favour of something else: the attractions of a "strong man", radical white supremacy, or some other idea. They hold whatever motivates them dearer than government under law, of , by, and for the people. Republicans and others who have rejected Trump have just as clearly turned away from what he represents and rejected his leadership so as to keep, for themselves and their children, the ordered liberty the United States Constitution, in its best expression, strives toward. The people in the middle, the ones who do not condone riots but do not consider Joe Biden "really" won, the ones who see, and say, the evidence supports no grand conspiracy theories of a stolen election but minimize the reality of the assault on the capitol and cheer Mr. Trump's acquittal; these people, in a sense, represent the most devoted of followers. They see where the tape goes, and they grasp, in some way, where Mr. Trump's leadership is taking their country; they do not want to go there, and yet they will not turn away. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcL3wCHDBkNJjNus_W9HhLXpGaCQXPnZ0Yh7_eFdVAAMxfn4gnbqrQbDbvfYgvhFar5t8Sjd86XDaPUzd9wuD8pi156miJqNaimgomHS6a8nZybgoT7sFv7OnkSxzW-WPJrhSnQ/s136/Jan_6_07.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Accused participant(s) in the assault on Congress" border="0" data-original-height="112" data-original-width="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcL3wCHDBkNJjNus_W9HhLXpGaCQXPnZ0Yh7_eFdVAAMxfn4gnbqrQbDbvfYgvhFar5t8Sjd86XDaPUzd9wuD8pi156miJqNaimgomHS6a8nZybgoT7sFv7OnkSxzW-WPJrhSnQ/s16000/Jan_6_07.png" title="Assault on Congress, taken from an FBI Request for Information, Public Domain, no author information" /></a></div><br /></div><p></p><p>It is those people, above all, whom we need to remind not all choices have a middle way. Not every decision allows for compromise. You either back democracy and the rule of law, or you do not. Whether you enthusiastically wish to take a swan dive off the stage for art, or whether you cannot bring yourself to leave the tape guiding you to the edge, you will fall just as hard. </p><p><br /></p></div><p></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-9787996337510411172021-02-11T10:40:00.017-05:002021-02-15T16:17:53.847-05:00On celibacy<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toronto_Van_Attack_Memorial.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Quentin9909, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons"><img alt="Toronto Van Attack Memorial" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Toronto_Van_Attack_Memorial.jpg" title="Toronto Van Attack Memorial, by Quentin9909, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Toronto Van Attack Memorial<br />by Quentin9909</td></tr></tbody></table>At two thirty-seven in the afternoon of April 23, 2018, Alek Minassian drove a rented van down a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack">killing ten people</a> and injuring sixteen others. According to social media posts retrieved after the event, he announced his crime in the following words: <blockquote><blockquote>Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!</blockquote></blockquote><p>We still do not know the exact relationship between Alek Minassian and the so-called "incel" movement. In the initial social media statement and subsequent interviews, he has claimed membership in what he, at least, appears to have considered a movement. His own claims to have a connection with the internet users who call themselves "incels" played some role in his <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/11/09/alek-minassian-will-argue-hes-not-criminally-responsible-for-the-yonge-st-van-attack-what-you-need-to-know-about-his-ncr-defence.html">criminal defence</a>, but if any members of the "incel" movement have claimed him, the media appears not to have reported it. </p><p>Alek Minassian's lawyers claim his autism has distorted his thinking so severely he could not understand running people over with a van was wrong. This claim <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/11/18/this-is-demeaning-to-everyone-why-alek-minassians-defence-is-provoking-anger-in-canadas-autism-community.html">appalls</a> most <a href="https://www.flare.com/news/the-danger-in-alek-minassians-autism-defence/">advocates</a> for people with autism; it paints people already burdened by misunderstanding and hostility as a lethal threat. In a sense, though, the legal case matters less than the question of why Alek Minassian found the online snarls from the fever swamps of the Internet compelling. <span>Whatever the judge in Alek Minassian's murder trial decides in a month's time, he can expect years if not decades in secure custody, the ten people he killed by running them over with a van will still be dead, and the sixteen people he injured will still have to live with varying degrees of trauma. The malignant whispers from the corners of the Internet will persist as well, ready to delude and snare the unwary. This tragedy has taught us the dangers of those whispers. It makes sense to ask if we can answer them.</span></p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span>In the case of at least some autistic men, I think we can. More: I think by understanding the attraction the complaints of "incels" have for some young autistic men, we may learn about our society, knowledge we can, perhaps, make use of. </span><p></p><p><span>It's important to understand this does not necessarily apply to the specific case of Alek Minassian. If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person, and I do not know Alek Minassian. I do not know how he came to identify with the complaints emanating from the "incels" on the net. I do, however, have some idea of the sources of frustration inherent in many common expressions of autism.</span></p><p><span>Autism frequently expresses as an aversion to contact. Autistic people frequently dislike having other people touch or hold us; Temple Grandin famously went so far as to build a "squeeze machine" to give herself the touch she could not accept from other people. A Danish company has now produced a commercial version of the device; those who have less money, or who prefer a less technological approach use weighted blankets to accomplish much the same thing. </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="326" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G5ulaPNyfMk" width="501" youtube-src-id="G5ulaPNyfMk"></iframe></div><br /><span>Obviously, this expression of autism will thwart ordinary sexual activity; equally obviously, this will lead to frustration. Men and women in that situation are not involuntarily celibate, but rather celibate by nature. While we do not choose our nature, it is not imposed on us by other people. We do not choose to be placental mammals, but those imaginary scapegoats of the "incel" message boards, the "Chads", "Stacys" and "normies" have not imposed our nature on us, either. </span>The first message to young autistic people, young men in particular, needs to answer the darker whispers from the dark web. We need to point out the futility, and the indignity, of trying to blame others for something you simply are.<p></p><p>The second message to offer these young people, the young men in particular, is a word of hope: it gets better. Autism is not a permanent banishment from fulfilling relationships. What may look, from the perspective of a twenty year old, like an absolute "no" may appear in hindsight as "not yet". Maturity, and a sense of connection and trust can overcome the impulses causing autistic people to shy from contract. For some of us, that makes marriage and family life possible. Other autistic people, who may never marry or have children, can build, have built, full and fulfilling lives.</p><p>The third message is not just for autistic people, nor is it necessarily only for men. The underlying message of the so-called "incel" movement, a sense of grievance at exclusion from a presumed life of happiness through sex, depends on a broader consensus about the place of sex in our culture and particularly in the lives of young people. That consensus equates happiness and in some sense value and success with access to sex with other people. Feminists rightly, and angrily, denounce the sense of entitlement driving the grievances of the so-called "incel" web posters, declaring nobody owes anyone sex. Yet the notion of sex as a "good", remains pervasive in our culture. With that comes the application to sex of what economists refer to as the "pig principle" or the impulse to obtain as much of what is "good" as possible. Plenty of people, not to mention a large number of corporations, promote the ability to convince a long series of people to engage in sex with you as an advantage; these people and businesses will gladly sell you techniques and products to engage, safely, in an "active social life". Serial monogamy as a good way of life, at least for the young and unmarried, does not have the universal approval, but does enjoy a general resignation. As long as all the participants consent, and have reached the age to consent, then whether we approve or not, we at least tacitly accept. This makes sense for those who believe, as many of us still do, in one frictionless universal and Friedmanesque market, and acknowledge one currency for the measurement of human worth. </p><p>But what about those of us whose minds and bodies do not fit this approach to sex? Perhaps we have coded in our brains and nerves some wisdom, some natural prudence. Perhaps we should not treat our impulse to refuse contact with people before we build a solid bond of trust and care as a curse or a defect. Even if voices ranging from pickup artists to porn studios, cosmetics makers to sports car manufacturers, tell us we will find happiness with a string of one night stands behind us as long as Jacob Marley's chain, maybe the wisdom in our bones and nerves makes a better guide, at least for us, than social expectations and commercial imperatives. We need to ask why we experience the periods of celibacy we experience, or the kind of celibacy in our lives, as a curse. It might make more sense for us to see it as, if not a blessing, then at least benefiting us as well as holding us back.</p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-56713557288127573272021-01-24T20:28:00.004-05:002021-01-24T23:00:55.424-05:00Living not by lies but ignoring the truth<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Joe_Biden_sworn_in_1-20-09_hires_090120-N-0696M-204a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Joe Biden takes the presidential oath on January 20, 2021 to become 46th president of the United States, photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, USN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="268" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Joe_Biden_sworn_in_1-20-09_hires_090120-N-0696M-204a.jpg" title="Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, USN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="400" /></a></div><br />Reverend Dwight Longenecker <a href="https://dwightlongenecker.com/dreher-and-martin-two-prophets-for-today/">has reviewed</a> Rod Dreher's new book "Live Not by Lies", and his review essay is interesting. In fact, I would go so far as to call it fascinating: it brings to my mind an essay by Connor Cruise O'Brien called "What can become of South Africa?", in which he speaks of the potential of ideological rhetoric to "boggle the mind" and completely drive out ordinary, humble respect for everyday reality. Reading Fr. Longenecker's essay, I can't tell whether he actually does not see the contradictions in his writing, or whether he simply wants to know if his readers have paid attention, because he wrote the following paragraph in his glowing review of Mr. Dreher's book:<p></p><blockquote><p> No matter what you believe about the legality of Joe Biden’s election, the fact remains that half the country believe Donald Trump and his Trump army were planning a coup. The other half of the country believe Joe Biden accomplished a coup through a rigged election. Again, no matter what the facts are–the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might. Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for “security”. It was clearly a show of strength by the winning side. It was a display of military might to remind the other half of America who won and who is in charge. </p></blockquote><p> In case anyone has forgotten, one of the books praised in this review essay bears the title "Live Not by Lies". That context makes the above quote from the article quite remarkable. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/2021_United_States_Capitol_protests_-_6_January_2021_02.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Trump supporters, Capitol Hill protests Jan 6 2021 Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="214" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/2021_United_States_Capitol_protests_-_6_January_2021_02.jpg" title="Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trump supporters, Capitol Hill protests <br />by Elvert Barnes</td></tr></tbody></table>Consider the phrase: "no matter what you believe". For people who actually want to not live by lies, it has to matter what you believe. If you don't make an effort to align your beliefs with the truth, if you don't try to discern that truth and live by it, then you face something between a severe risk and an absolute certainty of living, in some important way, by lies. Despite its equivocation, however, the first sentence contains a statement backed by evidence: <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/51-percent-americans-believe-capitol-riots-were-attempted-coup-poll-1559792">roughly half of Americans polled</a> by Ipsos do consider the attack on the capitol an attempted coup. The second sentence, claiming the other half of Americans believe the Democratic Party carried out a coup by rigging the election, does not. A number of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-election-poll/half-of-republicans-say-biden-won-because-of-a-rigged-election-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUKKBN27Y1AG?edition-redirect=uk">polls have</a> <a href="https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/12/11/who-won-the-2020-presidential-election-joe-biden-or-donald-trump-depends-whom-you-ask/">asked Americans</a> their opinions about the fairness and accuracy of the US election. The <a href="https://morningconsult.com/form/tracking-voter-trust-in-elections/">most recent polls</a> I can find, taken close to the time Fr. Longenecker published his review, indicate 65%, or about two in three Americans, consider the election fair and accurate. All of the polls I have seen suggest the number of Americans who believe the Democrats managed to manipulate the election results so severely as to constitute a coup has generally hovered at about a third, and while that number rightly gives rise to concern, it does not come close to the fifty percent the phrase "the other half" suggests.<p></p><p>That brings us to the next sentence, and its introductory phrase: "no matter what the facts are". The next part of the sentence, "the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might," expresses a wholly subjective impression, one impossible to either prove or disprove. The sentence as a whole conveys an unwillingness to submit the writer's chosen impression to the facts and evidence. Yet a commitment to live according to the truth requires exactly that submission. Indeed, living by the truth only means anything when the evidence is inconvenient and the facts unwelcome. Here. Fr. Longenecker glosses over one undisputed if unwelcome fact: every qualified fact finding body determined the Joe Biden's election took place in accord with the constitution of the United States. Mr. Trump had ample opportunity to appeal to the courts, and they ruled the election proper and legitimate. Literally hundreds of judges, election security experts, and public officials, a respectable proportion of them Republicans, ruled the Biden-Harris ticket had won. Joe Biden's presidency rests on the foundation of the United States Constitution, and the procedures the constitution and laws set out for determining the will of the people in a presidential election. </p><p>The next sentence presents an unsupported opinion without qualification: "Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for 'security'." Everyone has a right to their opinion, but ignoring the facts in this case, again, runs counter to a commitment to live according to the truth. On January 6th, a violent rally by partisans of the outgoing president included multiple participants who invaded the halls of Congress, some of them clearly expressing an intent to murder any legislator who did their constitutionally mandated duty. The authorities had evidence these same people, or their allies, intended another violent attack on inauguration day. Since the United States is a heavily armed society, and since American experience shows, all too well, the havoc a disaffected person with a rife can wreak, the authorities had good reason to believe they would need a significant force to secure the inauguration. </p><p>The overall effect of this paragraph presents the election of Mr. Biden in a vaguely sinister light, mostly by glossing over some facts and ignoring others. I have no reason to doubt it presents Fr. Longenecker's emotions regarding the outcome of the election quite well, but a commitment to live by the truth requires, among other things, making a distinction between feelings and facts, between the wished for and the provably real. </p><div><br /></div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-77580691604480441732021-01-21T01:26:00.002-05:002021-01-21T01:28:37.025-05:00A welcome departure...<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Jeff_Sessions_at_Commerce%2C_Justice%2C_Science%2C_and_Related_Agencies_Subcommittee_2018.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jefferson Sessions Testifying at Congress" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Jeff_Sessions_at_Commerce%2C_Justice%2C_Science%2C_and_Related_Agencies_Subcommittee_2018.jpg" title="United States House of Representatives - Office of Robert Aderholt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jeff Sessions testifying<br />by Office of Robert Aderholt</td></tr></tbody></table> I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. <p></p><p>At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/politics/jeff-sessions-donald-trump-alabama-attorney-general/index.html">Jefferson Sessions</a>, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>Every government's record inevitably undergoes a reassessment in light of subsequent events, and as political hostilities fade. George W Bush, for example, left office after a series of disastrous failures, most notably the housing meltdown and financial crash, the Iraq war, and the failed relief efforts following hurricane Katrina. Many commentators, of all political stripes, declared him the worst president ever. Yet his initiative to support treatments and prevention efforts to arrest the spread of HIV in Africa, not widely noted or praised at the time, have lead to a reassessment of his legacy.</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Ursula_(detention_center)_2.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ursula (detention center) 2" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Ursula_(detention_center)_2.jpg" title="Ursula (detention center), US Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Immigration detention, US Government photo</td></tr></tbody></table>It will surprise nobody who reads this web log to learn I believe the Trump administration will leave one of the worst legacies of any American administration. I believe most of the assessments to come will show even parts of the record Donald Trump and his supporters rate as successes amounted to illusions. Prosperity based on borrowed money will not last, deals with autocratic regimes will only last if they improve conditions for the great majority of people, wealth generated by the destruction of the land, air and water will turn to ash. <p></p><p>The family separation policy was different. Decent people saw it as a stain on the United States from its inception. It marks the Trump administration as absolutely, outrageously cruel. Donald Trump's advisor <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-calls-for-stephen-miller-to-leave-white-house">Stephen Miller</a> promoted the policy; given credible reports of his connection to white nationalist outlets such as VDare and American Renaissance, as well as his promotion of the racist, anti-immigration tract "Camp of the Saints", it seems reasonable include a desire to discourage immigration by people of colour among his motives. Stephen Miller promoted the policy; Jeff Sessions carried it out.</p><p>Whether or not either man ever faces a legal reckoning for a policy of literally pulling toddlers out of their parents' arms, the people of the United States of America and the world should never forget what they did, nor ignore the evidence of why they did it. Mr. Sessions oversaw a policy of taking children from their parents as a "deterrent", inflicting trauma on children barely old enough to walk in order to terrify others tempted to seek refuge or opportunity in the United States. Under his authority, servants of the American government left toddlers comfortless on concrete floors under mylar blankets.</p><p>By a decisive majority, American voters have rejected these policies and the administration that carried them out. I hope the American people will never forget, never lose sight of what, precisely, they have voted against. </p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-33403663197754127122021-01-20T11:55:00.004-05:002021-01-20T11:55:44.400-05:00January 20<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Joe_Biden_in_Cyprus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Joe Biden on a visit to Cyprus, 2014" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Joe_Biden_in_Cyprus.jpg" title="David Lienemann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>As I write this, Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office as president of the United States. He now has an opportunity: to move American politics in a new and humane direction. He also has a series of challenges: a republic fractured, with at least some bitter end fans of the previous chief executive who will not accept him as their president, and who have made no secret of their propensity for violence. He has to lead his country through the worst months of a pandemic, made far worse by the blundering, posturing, and dishonesty of his predecessor. He has to deal with a historic deficit and a government burdened by over seven trillion dollars more debt than it carried when he left at the end of his terms as vice president. He, his government, and the American people also face the task of weaning the American economy off the twin narcotics of easy money and fossil fuels.</p><p>I wish him well. <br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-64088475074008158322021-01-09T17:52:00.000-05:002021-01-09T17:52:56.813-05:00Laying down a marker<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/2017.03.04_Pro-Trump_Rallies_Washington%2C_DC_USA_00364_(33124189331).jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Trump supporters with a Trump flag" border="0" data-original-height="729" data-original-width="800" height="292" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/2017.03.04_Pro-Trump_Rallies_Washington%2C_DC_USA_00364_(33124189331).jpg" title="Trump rally, photo by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trump Rally<br />by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA</td></tr></tbody></table>Imagine a miracle. Someone with the power to do so takes every Trump supporter through the voting systems of American democracy. They examine every contested state, every urban precinct, every ballot, voting machine, line of code, signature and mailer envelope. All the millions who came to his rallies, sent in their money, or voted for the man and his enablers, get to see in detail how the voters recorded their choices, how the poll workers counted them, and how the tallies and the counts and recounts worked. <br /><p>Let us assume this examination would reveal exactly what the <a href="https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election" rel="nofollow"> Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council</a> has said of the election as a whole. Let us assume it confirms what Georgia Secretary of State <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Raffensperger">Brad Raffensperger</a> has told the world about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Georgia">Georgia election</a> and its <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/529028-georgia-secretary-of-state-says-he-will-recertify-election-results-after">associated</a> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/politics/georgia-recount-recertification-biden/index.html">recounts</a>, and what the <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/0,9309,7-387-90499_90640-546114--,00.html">Michigan</a>, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-challenges-election-designed-damage-disenfranchise-pennsylvania-lieutenant/story?id=74280314">Pennsylvania</a>, and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/30/politics/doug-ducey-defends-election-arizona-trump/index.html">Arizona</a> government officials had to say. Assume our imaginary audit shows each Trump supporter why American state and federal courts have <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-election-results-2020-11">rejected</a> thirty-eight lawsuits by the Trump campaign and layers aligned with him.</p><p>How many of the Trump supporters who have refused to accept the election results would change their minds? How many of the protestors chanting "stop the steal" would, if presented with irrefutable proof no corruption or tampering sufficient to tip the election results had taken place, change their minds, still their protests, and accept Joe Biden as their president?</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Ballot_box_in_Denver%2C_October_2020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ballot box in Denver, CO" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Ballot_box_in_Denver%2C_October_2020.jpg" title="Jami430, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ballot Box, by Jami430</td></tr></tbody></table>Some would. Human behaviour allows no absolutes, and among the millions of bitter end Trump supporters, some undoubtedly think they have evidence of fraud in the election. If they could see the whole truth of the election results, those people would accept them.</p><p>Listening to just a few interviews with Trump supporters, however, will disabuse anyone of any expectation all, or perhaps even a majority of the Trump supporters we see denying the election's validity will ever accept the results, whatever the evidence. The reasons seem to fall into three categories: a perceived existential need for a Trump victory, an inability to comprehend President-elect Biden's appeal, and a conviction perceived media unfairness somehow vitiates the election results. </p><p>Interviews with the die-hard Trump supporters arriving in Washington before the last stand of Trump and his backers at the capitol on January 6 suggest the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/9/12/12862434/flight-93-election">sentiments</a> expressed in the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-election/">article</a> "The flight 93 election" have not dissipated much. Demonstrating the security and integrity of the election will not reconcile people to results they fear will lead to their extinction, or to people who cannot comprehend the choices voters made to elect Joe Biden.</p><p>Some Republican politicians who strove to overturn, or at least delay, the election results, appealed to the distrust of the recent election Trump voters had expressed, and claimed they only wanted further investigation. After three months of recounts and investigations in which Trump's advocates had wide access to the courts and the cooperation of multiple secretaries of state, it did not make a lot of sense to call for further investigation. After the events of the afternoon of January 6, it made even less sense. Any idea the extreme partisans of the "stop the steal" movement would yield to further investigation, when the most basic considerations of the rule of law did not restrain them, has, to put it mildly, little credibility.</p><p>Political dislocation can attract people with highly unrealistic views of the world, and certainly the nightmare visions of the so-called "Q-anon" movement attract people predisposed to grandiose explanations for the ordinary. Mr. Trump's misleading rhetoric and pathological refusal to accept either responsibility or defeat fits a world view oriented to fantasy all too well. All that said, it makes sense to look for the method in the madness. A path, however tenuous and convoluted, very frequently exists between the shadows we fear, and very real changes and challenges in our lives. </p><p>Some protestors who screamed the election of Joe Biden was a fraud have done so because they identified with Donald Trump's wounded ego. Others perhaps have built a fantasy body politic and are now trying to live in it. The claims of fraud, however, have the potential to serve a different and sinister purpose: they lay down a marker against the Democratic Party's stated intention to renew the voting rights act. The violence on display at the American capitol, and levied earlier against a young man in Georgia who took a temporary job working on the election and had a mob threaten to hang him for treason, the harassment of officials high and low, including two United States senators; these have the potential to act as a brake on the push towards more fair and open voting in the United States.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="336" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nH9FnY0qvNI" width="474" youtube-src-id="nH9FnY0qvNI"></iframe></div><p></p><p>At least some of the people who stormed the United States Capitol almost certainly know the portion of the American population with white privilege will inevitably dwindle from a majority to a plurality in twenty five years. Long before that, multi-racial coalitions built around policies genuinely acceptable to everyone, from the descendants of slaves to the most recent immigrant and refugee, will enjoy a decisive advantage in electoral politics throughout most of the United States. Plenty of conservatives regard this development with what appears, from their behaviour, as an existential dread. In this context, the specific form the violence marking the last year of the Trump presidency has taken makes a kind of sense.</p><p>I am an outsider, but I will take the liberty to point out an approach to dealing with senseless violence: act without fear and according to principle. Neither fail to do the right thing on account of threats, nor dismiss the concerns of those who resort to threats if these concerns have a valid argument supporting them. In this case, I would suggest perhaps a revitalized voting rights act could contain measures, in the form of standards and supports for election security, to prevent all forms of election tampering: both the form, all too common in the United States, consisting of preventing qualified voters from casting ballots, and the far less common forms of fraud: dead or nonexistent voters casting votes. Election security should never act as an excuse to block access to the ballot box for legitimate voters.</p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-41350264770479835912021-01-06T18:09:00.001-05:002021-01-06T18:09:34.258-05:00A trophy of ashes<p>At a pivotal moment in the film "The Bounty", when the mutineers under Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) are about to put Captain William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and the crew loyal to him into the ship's boat and set them adrift in the Pacific, Bligh asks his former second in command if he thinks he can command the mutineers, "this rabble". Bligh reminds Christian he failed, and Bligh had the law behind him. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="412" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AZIlLRwCn08" width="639" youtube-src-id="AZIlLRwCn08"></iframe></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><div>What on Earth do Donald Trump and his enablers think they can accomplish? Assume for a moment they do disrupt the democratic process in the United States, what then? Do they, does anyone seriously think Donald Trump can seize power; do they believe they can seize power illegally and then exercise it? </div><div><br /></div><div>The "stop the steal" chanters may believe President-Elect Biden, four state governments (some Republican), and fifty federal justices, including a generous proportion of Trump appointees, somehow "stole" the election. Do they not grasp the simple corollary: if the disorder of this day succeeded, by some arcane political legerdemain, in installing Donald Trump as president for another four years, Americans who voted against Trump would perceive their votes as having been stolen. Unlike Donald Trump's fans, cheated Democrats would have the backing of the law, the courts, and the United States federal legislature. I don't know of anyone with the political skills to govern effectively in those circumstances; on the evidence so far, it looks pretty clear the task far exceeds the abilities Donald Trump brings to the table.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Mr. Trump and his cronies, enablers and supporters somehow "win", they will achieve nothing but division, conflict, paralysis at best and very widespread violent conflict at worst. They can achieve no victory except a trophy of ashes.</div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-3662115574933968962020-12-22T03:35:00.000-05:002020-12-22T03:35:10.480-05:00Dr. Biden, I presume...<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Jill_Biden_official_portrait.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Picture of Dr. Jill Biden" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Jill_Biden_official_portrait.jpg" title="Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ralph Alswang, White House <br />photographer<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Now eighty million American voters, well over fifty United States judges, and the electoral college have awarded the title of president elect to Joe Biden, mainstream conservative publications have a problem. Refusing to call Mr. Biden the president elect looks increasingly desperate, increasingly unrealistic, and with increasing clarity, it reveals a lack of respect for American democracy. At the same time, it seems evident a great many people with influence among conservatives don't believe in conceding with any grace. Perhaps they have internalized Winston Churchill's quote:<blockquote>Nations which go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.</blockquote><p> Most of us can discern the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Democratic Party, but American politics has grown more extreme lately. Some conservative opinion journalists in search of a hill to defend have found one: they may have to call Mr. Biden the president, but to call the incoming first lady by her academic title of Dr. Biden: never.</p><span></span><p>It started with an essay in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal decrying Dr. Biden's use of her title, then spread to National Review, where <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/jill-bidens-doctorate-is-garbage-because-her-dissertation-is-garbage/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=second">one article</a> gives the laxity of American libel standards a serious workout by suggesting, with no apparent basis save the writer's own opinion, the University of Delaware had chucked its standards to award a degree to the spouse of a senator.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>It was a series of petty and hypocritical attacks on an accomplished woman for daring to use an academic title she has an absolute right to. It also refuted itself in an almost comic fashion, asking us to imagine the use of Dr. Biden's title suddenly mattered right after the courts swept away a series of lawsuits attempting to overturn the judgement of millions of American voters. The usual terms, such as patronizing and misogynist, certainly applied. I didn't have much to add to these until I happened upon a YouTube clip of <i>West Wing</i>.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C_BRd1fegBw" width="560"></iframe><p>In this clip, a choir sings the carol Little Drummer Boy while one of the staffers attends a military funeral he has arranged for a homeless veteran. What does this have to do with Jill Biden's doctorate? Only this: it reminded me of the way so many conservatives have abandoned any pretense at the principles they used to hold.</p><p>Remember Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of Humayun Khan? Humayun Khan gave his life for his country; his gold star parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, spoke out against Donald Trump's scapegoating of Muslims at Hilary Clinton's Democratic Convention, and, to put it politely, Donald Trump brushed them off. Among all the standards and rules Donald Trump and his enablers and toadies have disrespected, that one still sticks in my memory.</p><p>Why? Because it used to be a principle of conservatives, everywhere, to honour the sacrifices of those who put their lives on the line for their country. It used go beyond the obvious, rational calculation: any country, any movement, with a belief in using armed force to support itself in any situation must respect those who fall in its defence. Conservatives used to assert this as a moral principle: a responsibility to respect the debt those who benefit from a soldier's sacrifice have to both soldier and survivors. Donald Trump paid that principle scant respect, and for me his contempt stands in for all the other American institutions and understandings he has loudly proclaimed his contempt for.</p><p>A hand full of honourable conservatives have opposed him. Some have resisted all the way; others, a few, have followed him part of the way down the path and then said one or other statement or action of his went too far. But the great mass of the conservative movement rolled with Donald Trump and his movement: rolled over one principle after another.</p><p>So now conservatives have planted a threadbare flag, a flag denuded of respect for elections, for limited government, for the rule of law, for fiscal prudence. The flags borne by Trump's followers do not stand for any consideration for those who have laid down their lives for their country, even to the point of indicating the most basic respect for the debt Americans owe to Humayan Khan, his parents, and by extension their community. But they have still planed a flag, and they still have a principle: the most petty of academic snobberies, a notion barely worth a snort or sneer in any faculty common room. They have a transparently political claim, one they rightly declined to spill a drop of ink or disturb a single electron with until Joe Biden won the presidential election. </p><p>I would dare conservatives to try to come up with something more risible and pathetic, but I fear their Trump-induced quicksand has no bottom. </p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-81654722207662468202020-11-23T23:37:00.000-05:002020-11-23T23:37:00.507-05:00Voting, voters, and entropy<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Tucker_Carlson_(8566991568).jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Tucker_Carlson_(8566991568).jpg" title="Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tucker Carlson <br />by Gage Skidmore</td></tr></tbody></table>A popular metaphor for entropy, attributed to <a href="https://logosconcarne.com/2011/07/15/barrel-of-wine-barrel-of-sewage/">Schopenhauer</a>, goes like this: if you take a barrel of sewage and pour in a glass of fine French wine, you have a barrel of sewage. If you take a barrel of fine French wine and (shudder) pour in a glass of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage.<div><div><br /></div><div>In one of his nightly opinion pieces, Tucker Carlson sarcastically lauded the triumph of voters who cast ballots from the grave. He later had to retract one of his examples after learning one of the ballots he cited had come from a very much alive widow, who had identified herself as Mrs. (husband's name). Carlson's sarcasm had an interesting effect: it produced an emotional reaction sufficient to briefly cloud my analysis, and I had to take a (virtual) step back to analyze what he had to say. Once I broke his arguments down and considered them, I found a couple of interesting layers, ones hinting at American Conservative strategy going forward. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Ballot_Drop_Box.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="American ballot drop box" border="0" data-original-height="757" data-original-width="800" height="303" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Ballot_Drop_Box.jpg" title="Cliffordsnow, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ballot drop box<br />photo by Clifford Snow</td></tr></tbody></table><br />On the top layer, Mr. Carlson's argument works out to a straightforward fallacy: his claims imply any name found on both the death rolls and on a ballot must indicate fraud. Leaving aside the case of widows and widowers whose names differ only by the prefix "Mr." or "Mrs.", families name children after their relatives so often we have the common English noun "namesake". Fallacies aside, some minor cheating almost certainly took place in this election. Whether postmortem voting, voting by persons unqualified to vote, or isolated miscounting, any election result in just about any democracy will contain some invalid votes, just as some people who have a right to vote will find themselves unable to. Americans have a fairly long history of accepting a certain amount of cheerful chicanery when it comes to elections: multiple sources quote, as a standard American mnemonic for translating magnetic compass courses to true courses, the phrase "Can dead men vote twice?" for compass course, deviation, magnetic course, variation, true course. The casual appearance of this phrase in popular culture suggests a public perception of democracy as able to accept a certain level of cheating. In reality, of course, the historical vote tampering in the United States, at least the tampering which changed election results and shifted power, consists mostly of the ruthless suppression of African American votes during the period between reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Pace Mr. Carlson, the true disgrace to American democracy does not come from Americans who voted from the grave; it comes from Americans who ended up in a grave after they tried to vote.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Probing more deeply, though, we come on another and more interesting layer of the argument, the idea of vote dilution. Mr. Carlson mentions this in passing, in a backhanded acknowledgement of the absence of any evidence, so far, of cheating widespread enough to tip the election. Still, according to Mr. Carlson's aside, cheating in elections does serious harm even if it does not change the result. He claimed each invalid ballot cast cancels out a ballot someone cast lawfully, which requires some questionable assumptions. Even on a statistical basis, if three thousand people cast a lawful ballot for Ivan the Terrible, and two thousand live people and ten dead people cast ballots for Ghengis Khan, does that mean each invalid vote cancels a valid one for the other side? It doesn't change the result. Even looking at the votes as a percentage, the hundred illegal votes only change the percentage of votes Ivan receives by 0.12%, which means, on a proportional basis, the hundred illegal votes for Ghengis only cancel out four of Ivan's voters.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't believe Mr. Carlson intends to make that point. I think, rather, he, and probably his target audience, perceive illegal votes as contaminating and spoiling an election, in the same way a glass or even a teaspoon of sewage ruins an entire barrel of fine French wine. Considering an election in this light, as a sacred event in need of purity, contaminated, fouled and polluted by even one invalid vote, reinforces the impulse to secure elections against illegal votes. This, in turn, tends to justify security measures, which as various American courts have determined, tend to disenfranchise the poor and powerless, and in at least one instance, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693/supreme-court-declines-republican-bid-to-revive-north-carolina-voter-id-law">African Americans specifically</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>It doesn't really matter why Mr. Carlson approaches elections as a ritual in which purity plays an essential role. His perspective contains a contradiction: to whatever extent permitting illegal votes contaminates elections with unlawful ballots, if security measures prevent qualified electors from casting ballots, these measures freight, or contaminate, the votes of those allowed the franchise with privilege. Unearned privilege surely contaminates an election result as much as vote dilution, and we know privilege has historically played a much greater role in American elections than illegal voting. Ideally. of course, election security measures would both ensure every person with a legitimate right to vote had the chance to cast a ballot, and nobody without the right to vote ever did. It appears at this moment no government has found a way to achieve this result. Absent perfect election security, we must accept the best compromise between exclusion and cheating we can achieve. A regime based on the refusal to tolerate any cheating at all as an unbearable corruption, contamination, and debasement of the electoral process will only corrupt the process in the opposite direction, making the franchise exclusive to the privileged.</div><div><br /></div><div>If we look at the contaminated wine barrel analogy closely, we see it actually weighs against an extreme desire for purity. A single glass, even a single spoonful of sewage will ruin a barrel of fine French wine, but if you take fine French grapes, crush them, remove all impurities and place them in a barrel, in six years you will have a barrel of grape juice. Winemaking depends on a contaminant; it requires yeast to turn sugars into alcohol, a process we might, in other cases, consider spoilage. For good reasons, the English language uses the same word, sterile to describe an instrument or environment as perfectly free of germs and contaminants, and to describe a person or place as barren. Imperfections, to some extent, define a living process. A living body politic, an ongoing debate and effort to define the best way forward for a city or a nation, always involves imperfections.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems clear at least some conservatives in the United States may come out of the recent election determined to channel the conviction their opponents somehow "stole" the presidential election into further attempts to purify the voting, which will, by chance or design, restrict effective access to the ballot box. I suggest that shows a need to both resist the policy and to address, and refute, the thinking behind it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29903046.post-40275107914539458052020-11-11T00:00:00.001-05:002020-11-11T00:00:10.264-05:00The Problem of Traditionalism<p> The American Conservative published <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-history-teachers-view-why-liberal-elites-cant-understand-the-trump-vote/">a somewhat predictable jeremiad</a> against modern thinking, lamenting the inability of the modern, rationalist outlook to comprehend the phenomenon of Donald Trump's popularity. The author wrote:</p><blockquote><p> As the AP European History concept outline in my textbook uncritically puts it: “They [Enlightenment thinkers] sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance, challenging traditional values.”</p></blockquote><p>He later writes: </p><blockquote><p>One can almost imagine the line I just quoted grafted onto the present: They [Democrats] sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance, challenging the traditional values of Trump voters in flyover country.</p></blockquote><p>Well, everyone has the right to imagine, or if you insist, "almost imagine" anything, although I cannot quite see why anyone would go to the trouble of "almost imagining" anything. But equating the traditional values of mediaeval and pre-enlightenment Europe with whatever motivated Americans to pull the lever for Donald Trump ignores almost all of the specific principles at issue. The Declaration of Independence, and even more the Constitution of the United States are, after all, manifestos of 18th century enlightenment principles. The analogy falls apart the moment you apply hard specifics: voting, the idea of the people collectively selecting the head of their state, specifically repudiates the idea of the divine right of monarchs, a cardinal value of European politics from the fall of the Roman Republic up until the Long Parliament and the Glorious Revolution. The voters who went to pull the lever for Donald Trump acted out a basic ritual of the enlightenment.</p><p>The article did mention a peasant revolt against the extreme rationalism of the French Revolution, but instead of addressing the critical divide between principled conservatism and traditionalism, the author descended into a lament for the students these days.</p><p>And thus we have another article exemplifying traditionalism: a bare-knuckle defence of the outrageous innovations of a decade or a century (or two) ago. </p><p><br /></p>John Spraggehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437986321694071989noreply@blogger.com0