Dean's World

Some quotes for rumination.

"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance." -- Arendt, Hannah

"Without a love of humankind there is no love of God." -- Asch, Sholem

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." -- Asimov, Isaac

"Democracy substitutes self-restraint for external restraint. It is more difficult to maintain than to achieve." -- Brandeis, Louis D.

"Just as the Temple was destroyed through baseless hatred, it will only be rebuilt through baseless love." -- Kook, Rav

""My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."" -- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

"The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it." -- Mill, John Stuart

"Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence." -- Bailey, Pearl

"Violence does even justice unjustly." -- Carlyle, Thomas

These violent delights have violent ends." -- Shakespeare, William

"If you want peace, work for justice." -- Pope Paul VI

All I have to add is, let us not mistake the boasts of boys for the wisdom of men.

Xerxes was curious as to what the Greeks were trying to do (presumably because there were so few numbers) and had some Arcadian deserters interrogated in his presence. The answer was that all the other men were participating in the Olympic Games. When Xerxes asked what the prize for the winner was, "an olive-wreath" came the answer. Upon hearing this, Tigranes, a Persian general, said: "Good heavens, Mardonius, what kind of men are these that you have pitted against us? It is not for money that they contend but for glory of achievement!" (Godley translation).[54]

Huh. New guy at Balloon Juice Michael D likes to pick on girls.

Michael, as a reading comprehension public service I requote part of Willow's post to you:

Every so often I like to see how far one of my fundamental beliefs can be stretched by intelligent opposition.

Michael: Willow certainly got what she was looking for in the comment threads here at DW. Your comment thread at BJ, however, was notably lacking in the penultimate part of the statement above.

Lamentably, I killed your cat while trying just to sting it. It was crouched, as usual, under one of our bird feeders & I fired from some distance with bird shot.

I’ll be glad to get you another of your choice.

Two institutes of Higher Education have been floating around the periphery of the news lately. Fortunately there are several bloggers paying closer attention.

The latest issue has been the University of Delaware’s Student Housing re-education program where the Resident Assistants were trained in having one-on-one meetings with students living in the dorms to discuss living situations and essentially train them in diversity. It sounds like just more PC fuzzy-bunnyness until you look into the details, after which you have to wonder just who it was who thought this was a good idea, and did they once consult the University’s legal department before putting it in place?

UPDATE: If you are only going to read one of the above links, please read THIS ONE.

Welcome to the new Gulag, same as the old Gulag.

Then there is the story of William and Mary College, where College President Gene Nichol began by removing the cross from the Wren chapel on campus in order to make the 274-year-old chapel more welcoming to students of other faiths. Next came the anonymous student denunciation system whereby students were encouraged to report other students engaging in inappropriate speech or activities. Since the spotlight was shone on this program the language at the reporting site has been modified to render it somewhat less Orwellian in appearance, but can any good really come of such a system on a college campus?

I like to believe that the portrayals of rampant PC intolerance in education are at least a little overblown, but sometimes it's hard...

Links via Instapundit and Powerline

Two interesting articles I encountered today that are only tangentially related (They both reference Guy Fawkes):

The first is a post from Armed Liberal at Winds of Change discussing his position on torture, opening with the following:

I've wrestled and wrestled with the issue; torture is obviously bad, but what is it about torture that is so expressly bad - why is it worse than the death and suffering that comes in war, or in the daily violence police officers do as a part of their jobs?

In large part, it's the fact of violence against captives; against the helpless, the unarmed, those incapable of resisting. But that didn't get to the heart of what cleaves torture as an issue from violence as an issue. And why I - as someone who is decidedly not nonviolent - am so decidedly against and uncomfortable with issues of torture.

I came to an answer, as I usually do, in an unplanned realization while reading a book.

The ensuing article and the comments themselves are well worth your time.

Second, via Instapundit I found Dave Kopel’s 2001 article Virtue in Equivocation where he references Guy Fawkes and the Gun Powder Plot as an introduction to the concept of virtuous lying, where it applies and where it doesn’t. This was in relation to Osama Awadallah, a Jordanian student attending Grossmont College (a college in El Cajon, California, which caters to international students), being indicted by a New York City grand jury for lying to the grand jury about his relationship with September 11 terrorists Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar. He then goes on to explain how the concept of Virtue in Equivocation doesn’t necessarily apply to Islamic radicals. In the process he also sheds light on the question of the rights of jurors and the concept of jury nullification.

All in all, two very interesting takes on the assorted subjects.

“One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Tuesday, stressing the need to pass the Democrats’ comprehensive energy package.

Moments later, when asked by a reporter if he really believed global warming caused the fires, he appeared to back away from his comments, saying there are many factors that contributed to the disaster.

I once told a friend of mine I could drag a fine-toothed comb through the facts of his current living situation and find at least one crime to indict him on. He didn't believe me, but I asked him if he did his own taxes. He said he did and I said I wouldn't need to look at anything but his last three returns.

The point being made was rules and laws are so byzantine and changeable that it is virtually impossible to avoid breaking some of them. Nobody notices or cares until somebody who thought they were within the law finds himself the subject of court proceedings and a local or national news story. Those sorts of things can make people view rules and authority as potentially arbitrary, and that attitude leads to a growing disrespect. That disrespect manifests itself in ways that prompt the masses and their enablers in government to spew forth yet more rules and laws. Wash, rinse, repeat. Forever.

The explosion of rules is a poorly conceived and even more poorly implemented attempt to create a civil society out of a mass of individuals who no longer reflexively view themselves as part of any community other than those narrowly defined to provide them with advantages over others, either materially or emotionally. The notion of responsibility to the community at large has been eroded past recovery and it will take a serious dose of compounded tragedies to begin to revive it- assuming there will be enough people who recognize the need to do so.

Discuss

Originally submitted as a comment to this post.

You kill an idea by creating a better idea.

Journalists who think they are telling "the truth" don't understand the truth. We each have our own truth.

- Lasting regime change for the purposes of liberalization/democratization can not succeed if driven primarily by foreign military intervention.

(cross-posted at City of Brass. Note I've categorized this article as "Philosophy" rather than "The War" here at DW.)

on the origin of the word, atomic, from the Greek atomos:

In Greek, the prefix "a" means "not" and the word "tomos" means cut. Our word atom therefore comes from atomos, a Greek word meaning uncuttable.

the problem with discourse is that we tend to load up our ideas with detail. This results in people who might actually share the same underlying principles to disagree vociferously on an issue because they perceive the other side to be opposed to the common aim. A good example is the "not anti-war but on the other side" trope that gets bandied about against lefties on the topic of Iraq.

the way it should work instead is that we articulate the basic - "atomic" - principles, and then evaluate policy against them. That evaluation can take many forms, though I personally ascribe to the methodology that demands that the means by which the desired end is achieved match in full the principles and values that defined said end. In other words, as I have argued before, the ends do not justify the means - and the means actually influence the ends. But absolutism on principle is also detrimental to success; perfection is the enemy of the good.

The process of defining principle first, defining end goals in accordance with those principles, and then devising means that both stay within the boundaries of those means AND (critically) actually achieve the desired end, is what I call "principled pragmatism". Part of the pragmatism comes from acknowledging that there is tension in the criteria for means, between principle and success; finding the right policy therefore requires human judgment, and intelligence, and knowledge. Only thus can the degree to which the two criteria are compromised be minimized. And compromised they inevitably are to some extent.

The above might be more succinctly summarized as,

principled pragmatism (PP): (a) the means influence the ends, but (b) perfection is the enemy of the good.

Here is where the need for atomic principles comes in. Principles that are too detailed ("Bush is Hitler"; "abortion is murder"; "The US is a rogue state"; "liberals are objectively pro-terrorist"; "not anti-war, but on the other side", etc) result in making it impossible to articulate effective policy. In other words, overly specific (and dogmatic) principles violate PP(b). Further, policy derived from such principles ultimately end up violating PP(a). For the requisite degrees of freedom needed to navigate the space of policy and principle without violating PP, we must have principles that are broader in scope, leaving human judgement and reason in control at the implementation level rather than blind obedience to dogma.

Of course, principle can't be so broad as to be devoid of meaning. "evil is bad" comes to mind. There needs to be a targeting of the idea towards a specific issue. This is far easier said than done, but the guiding light here can again be the "atomic" characteristic. Atomic principles literally must serve as building blocks, which can be rapidly assembled into more complex structures.

On Plato's theory of atomism:

Plato's Timaeus ... elaborates an account of the world wherein the four different basic kinds of matter—earth, air, fire, and water — are regular solids composed from plane figures: isoceles and scalene right-angled triangles.

What atomic principles might we articulate, then? Remember, these are principles, not axioms; disagreement is inevitable, and even beneficial! In the context of recent events, here are some I start with:

- Direct military intervention, including ground troops, are a moral obligation upon nations with the capability thereof, with regards to ongoing genocide and massacres.

- "With great power comes great responsibility" applies to nations as well as men; lack of direct self-interest in either case is not sufficient to excuse inaction.

- Lasting regime change for the purposes of liberalization/democratization can not succeed if driven primarily by foreign military intervention.‡

- Democracy is an end-product of liberalization, not an initial condition.

Upon these principles, rest pretty much my entire opposition to the specific implementation of the Iraq War by the present Administration, my support for almost all the Democratic presidential candidates over any GOP counterpart, and my increasingly weakening stance on maintaining a sizable troop contingent in Iraq for any length of time (though on the latter point, I still am against "withdrawal" as preferentially defined by the mainstream left). But disagreement on these issues of policy is far less fruitful than disagreement on the atomic principles above.

Incidentally, this essay more rightly belonged at Nation-Building blog, but Google robots have declared it to be a spamblog and thus it has been suspended pending review. I don't know how long that will take or even whether it will turn out in my favor but I do hope that 4 years of blogging there aren't consigned to /dev/null. My fate is in Google's hands. This was the final straw; I will be moving City of Brass off Blogger and cease using blogger entirely in the near future.

Related essay: the means influence the ends at City of Brass

‡acknowledgements: Daniel H in comments to a previous post for inspiration, and Chris Landsdown for subsequent correction.

Here is my favorite movie quote of all time regarding the status of fatherhood. It's from 1960's The Magnificent Seven (itself a great remake of a classic Japanese film). It was voiced by a scurrilous, no-account bachelor womanizer gunfighter hired to protect a small village beset by bandit raiders who hired these gunslingers to protect their families:

Village Boy 2: We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

O'Reilly: Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility: for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it: this is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

GENEVA - A prehistoric hunter known as Oetzi whose well-preserved body was found on a snow-covered mountain in the Alps died more than 5,000 years ago after being struck in the back by an arrow, scientists said in an article published Wednesday.

This leads me to Israel. I used to think Israel was making a mistake to occupy disputed land and give their enemies more reasons to attack and fewer reasons to make peace. Again, perhaps if we had a time machine there was a period in history where that was true. But we’re long past that. Now I believe there is sufficient perpetual hatred against Israel that it would be irrational for them to offer any concessions. It makes more sense to grab as much land and water as they can get their hands on. And it makes sense to keep the Palestinians in a permanent state of wretchedness and powerlessness as Israel consolidates its hold on those resources. In five hundred years, they’ll be glad they have more land and water.
...
While I think Israel’s policies are a dark grey form of evil, I support them because at this point they are being entirely rational. It would be hypocritical to deny any other nation the right to pursue their self-interest

If the Palestinians ever display an ability to offer a credible peace, I’m willing to revise my opinion. If not, the best advice I can give them is to say goodbye to their [expletive].

As an insomnia-sufferer I'm finding myself watching late night TV in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I'm now watching a long infomercial for "Girls Gone Wild."

Go ahead and laugh at me if you want. Yes, you got me: I'm a 41 year old married man and I find this compelling television. Sue me. But when I look at the whole "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon, I have reactions on multiple levels. Most of them intellectual.

The big questions in this cultural phenomenon seem to come to this:

1) Why are men excited by this?
2) Why do these women do this?

The angry "conservative" and/or "feminist" position would be that this is about "degradation of women." That's BS. Nothing in these videos is about degradation or contempt. Nobody who loves these videos hates women. If anything, it's empowering of the women involved. They know the men want them, and they love it.

What it seems to amount to is that people seek approval. The girls do it because they get positive affirmation for doing it. The boys love it because they just love it and don't want to apologize for it.

Boys like looking at girls, and girls like being looked at. That's just the way life is.

But still, it seems unhealthy. Am I wrong about that?

Still reading Thomas Aquinas via the writings of GK Chesterton--it's slow going basically because I've been being put through the wringer on the day job and my ability to concentrate is frazzled--but I was impressed pretty deeply by one argument: that with what we conceive in the world, between matter and form, matter is the far more liquid and mysterious, and form (i.e. shape, construction, design, structure, whatever you want to call it) the far more concrete and meaningful and predictable.

That one argument made me rethink a lot of things, and set me aback quite a ways. Because he's got a point: no matter how much we learn about the nature of matter, no matter how much we learn about atoms, particles, etc. it just gets weirder and weirder. As we go down to the molecular level it's weird, when we get down to the atomic level it's even weirder, if we get down to subatomic particles, then down to quarks and gluons, it all just gets weirder and weirder and weirder. And no matter how much we learn about it we always seem to find out more--and what if that's because there literally is no limit, no ultimate smallness, but it's infinite?

That right there made me understand Aristotle better than I ever thought I would. And it made me appreciate Aquinas a great deal. Indeed, that you could make such observations in Aristotle's time, Aquinas' time, Chesterton's time, and today, and still have a good argument, is deeply impressive: matter is ultimately mysterious and nebulous, and form is ultimately more concrete and important. That's quite an argument.