Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2024

The Jewish Avengers Who Hunted Nazi Murderers

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Middle East, Military, Religion, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published Mar 8, 2024

In March 1945, the first Jewish unit in the Allied forces reaches the frontline. Before fighting the Nazis, the men spent years battling against the policies of the British government. After the war, they will take vengeance on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and join the Zionist movement in building and fighting for Israel.
(more…)

February 15, 2024

Israel as an “Eschatological Garrison State”

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge outlines why Israel was compelled by its geostrategic position to react as strongly as possible to the October 7th atrocities along the southern border with Gaza:

“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It is almost impossible to find a dispassionate analysis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, simply because it sits directly upon a concatenation of ethno-religious fault lines. Palestinians are the object of concern for many of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims, particularly in the Arab world, who tend to view Gaza’s suffering and humiliation as their own. Israel, on the other hand, is a subject of rare agreement between American evangelicals (who believe that the nation state of Israel has relevance to Armageddon and the fate of Christianity) and the more secular American governing blob, which treats Israel as an American outpost in the Levant. To this, we can add the emerging religion of anti-colonialism, which views Palestine as something like the next great liberation project, akin to ending apartheid in South Africa or Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence.

My goal is not to convince any of the aforementioned people that their views are wrong, per se. Instead, I would like to argue that, despite these many powerful emotional-religious currents, much of the Israeli-Arab conflict can be understood in fairly mundane geopolitical terms. Despite the enormous psychological stakes that billions of people have in the subject matter, it still unfolds itself to a relatively dispassionate analysis.

The root of the problems lay in the peculiar nature of the Israeli state. Israel is not a normal country. By this, I mean neither that it is a special, providential country (as an American evangelical might say), nor that it is a uniquely wicked root of all evil. Rather, it is extraordinary in two important ways that relate to its function and geopolitical calculus, rather than its moral content.

First, Israel is an Eschatological Garrison State. This is a particular form of state which perceives itself as a sort of redoubt against the end of all things, and accordingly becomes highly militarized and highly willing to dispense military force. Israel is not the only such state to have existed in history, but it is the only obvious one extant today.

A historical comparison may help explain. In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire at last overran Constantinople and brought an end to the millennia-old Roman imperium, early medieval Russia found itself in a unique position. With the fall of the Byzantines (and the previous schism with western papal Christianity), Russia was now the only Orthodox Christian power remaining in the world. This fact created a sense of world-historic religious siege. Surrounded on all sides by Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Turko-Mongol Khanates, Russia became a prototypical Eschatological Garrison State, with a high degree of cooperation between Church and State and an extraordinary level of military mobilization. The character of the Russian state was indelibly formed by this sense of being besieged, of being the last redoubt of authentic Christianity, and the consequent need to extract a high volume of manpower and taxes to defend the garrison state.

Israel is much the same, though its sense of eschatological terror is of a more ethno-religious sort. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, founded in the shadow of Auschwitz, besieged on all sides by states with which it has fought several wars. Whether this justifies the kinetic aspects of Israeli foreign policy is not the point. The simple fact is that this is Israel’s innate self conception. It is an eschatological redoubt for a Jewish population that sees itself as having nowhere else to go. If one refuses to acknowledge the central Israeli geopolitical premise — that they would do anything to avoid a return to Auschwitz — one will never make sense of their actions.

January 14, 2024

Tristin Hopper imagines the thoughts of the Toronto Police Service

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of Toronto’s police department:

The Toronto police have not had a good week. After receiving widespread criticism for refusing to disperse an anti-Israel blockade targeting a north Toronto Jewish neighbourhood, video emerged this week of officers delivering coffee and donuts to the blockaders.

And so, only after a cross-section of local politicians and Jewish leaders had expressed bafflement at police inaction, did Toronto police announce plans on Thursday to actually put a stop to protests at the Avenue Road bridge. They even charged one protester with incitement of hatred for allegedly carrying a hate group’s flag at a protest in downtown Toronto.

Monday
I’m sorry — is that the sound of people wanting us to enforce the law? As in, “hey there, sworn peace officer, get in your car, go identify some criminality and use force to stop it?”

Are you sure about that, Toronto? You sure you don’t want us to instead try fixing this with a solidarity flag raising? Or maybe this is something that could be diffused with one of those equity roundtables you keep forcing us to attend.

After all, enforcing the law is a messy business. People could get hurt. This isn’t like handing out a traffic ticket or a jaywalking citation: You’re asking us to confront people who may not care that their actions are illegal, and may employ additional illegal methods to dispute that.

Tuesday
I’m still trying to get my head around this new paradigm. So to refresh: when people break laws, you want us to stop that? The Criminal Code. The Highway Traffic Act. The Controlled Substances Act. You want our officers to read up on contemporary legislation, seek out violators of said legislation, and then apply appropriate sanctions?

This is a minefield, frankly. We’re talking raised voices. Mean tweets. People in handcuffs. Unflattering videos. Outraged Toronto Star columns. This is how we board an escalator that may soon make us pine for the days when our only problems were an easily ignored minority demographic having their overpass shut down.

Wednesday
When we’re enforcing these laws, are you absolutely sure you want us to do this without first checking if they’re politically acceptable? I mean, it would obviously streamline everything if roadways were only ever blockaded by white supremacist cannibal pedophiles, but that’s rarely the case.

And what if they’re doing an illegal thing that is tangentially related to something you like? I had our legal guy look into it and he said that any laws broken as a result of a public protest are still illegal – the right to protest only covers legal things, it turns out. So bear with me; this could result in a city in which graffiti, blockades and vandalism OF ANY KIND could end up banned. It’s a slippery slope.

November 18, 2023

“René Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist”

Filed under: Books, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reviews I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard:

The phrase “I see Satan fall like lightning” comes from Luke 10:18. I’d previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as “I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning”. But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!

Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It’s an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that can’t even get mad.

Girard’s starting point is the similarity between Bible stories and pagan myths. You’ve heard about this before — dying-and-resurrecting gods, that sort of thing. You might expect Girard, a good Catholic, to reject these similarities. He doesn’t. He says they’re real and important. Pagan myths resemble the Bible because they’re both describing the same psychosocial process. The myths are distorted propaganda supporting the process, and the Bible is a clear-eyed description of the process which reveals it to be evil. Just as worshipful Soviet hagiographies of Stalin and sober historical analyses of Stalin will have many similarities (since they’re both describing Stalin), so there will be unavoidable resonances between myth and the Bible.

Girard calls this process “the single-victim process” or “Satan”. It goes like this:

  1. Most (all?) human desire is mimetic, ie based on copying other people’s desires. The Bible warns against coveting your neighbor’s stuff, because it knows people’s natural tendencies run that direction. It’s not that your neighbor has particularly good stuff. It’s that you want it because it’s your neighbor’s. Think of two children playing in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and starts playing with it. Then the other child tries to take it, ignoring all the hundreds of other toys available. It’s valuable because someone else wants it.
  2. As with the two children, conflict is inevitable. As the mimetic process intensifies, everyone goes from complicated individuals with individual wants, to copies of their neighbors (ie their desires copy their neighbors’ desires, and they become the sort of people who would have those desires). Alliances form and dissipate. There is a war of all against all. The social fabric starts to collapse.
  3. Instead of letting the social fabric collapse, everyone suddenly turns their ire on one person, the victim. Maybe this person is a foreigner, or a contrarian, or just ugly. The transition from individuals to a mob reaches a crescendo. The mob, with one will, murders the victim (or maybe just exiles them).
  4. Then everything is kind of okay! The murder relieves the built-up tension. People feel like they can have their own desires again, and stop coveting their neighbors’ stuff quite so hard, at least for a while. Society does not collapse. If there was no civilization before, maybe people take advantage of this period of relative peace to found civilization.
  5. (Optional step 5) Seems pretty impressive that killing one victim could cause all this peace and civilization! The former mob declares their victim to be a god. Killing the god was the necessary prerequisite to civilization. Now the god probably reigns in heaven or something. Maybe they die and resurrect every year. Whatever.
  6. Rinse and repeat.

Girard is against this process. Not just because it involves violent mobs lynching innocent people (although it does), but because that step perpetuates the whole cycle: people greedily desiring whatever their neighbors have, people hating their neighbors, internecine war of all against all. He dubs the process Satan, based partly on the original Hebrew meaning of Satan as “prosecutor”. Satan is the force that tells people that the victim is guilty and deserves to be lynched.

(and did you know that Paraclete, the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, originally meant “defense attorney”? The Paraclete is the force that — no, we’ll get to that later).

Are all myths and Bible stories really about this process? Girard says yes. For example, consider the myth of Oedipus. Around the end, Thebes is stricken by plague (Girard says plagues should usually be interpreted metaphorically as social plagues, ie discord). Everyone goes to the oracle and asks for a solution. The oracle says that someone has killed his father and married his mother, and the plague won’t end until that person is removed. It is revealed that Oedipus is the culprit. The mob expels Oedipus from the city, and the plague ends.

Okay, that’s one myth. Are there others?

November 2, 2023

With progressive allies like these …

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block record the reactions of progressive Jews who are waking up to discover that their “allies” hate them and want them dead:

After Donald Trump was elected, Emily Rose, 51, flew to New York with her daughters to walk in the Women’s March. She demonstrated on the streets of Minneapolis, where she lives, in the days after George Floyd’s murder. She donated money to small, black-led movements and social justice organizations that she believed in. She unlearned and then re-educated herself, as white Americans were instructed to, and read the teachings of anti-racist scholars like Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But then, after the massacre in Israel on October 7, when some 1,400 Jews were brutally murdered, not to mention the rapes, beheadings, and instances of torture, Rose began to notice something odd from the cohort of fellow progressives she admired: they were cheering for the other side.

“I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,” Rose said. “I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship. I will not stop fighting, because I believe in the causes themselves. But as for going out of my way to support, to post, to give money? I’m done.”

While professional politicos, like DSA founder Maurice Isserman, are publicly stepping down from their parties and denouncing organizations that justify, or even cheer, the events of October 7, and wealthy Jewish donors claw back their millions from elite universities that they say helped foment antisemitism on their campuses, there’s a quieter, more personal reckoning happening among progressive Jews. Like Rose, they feel betrayed by a left that they thought would have their backs.

Dov, 30, a Canadian musician who didn’t want to share her last name for privacy reasons, is transgender and a self-proclaimed “political progressive”. Since October 7, she says, “Every time I open Instagram I’m just like, blocking or deleting people that I thought I knew.” She calls anti-Zionism “cloaked antisemitism”.

Josh Gilman, 37, who lives in Arizona and prides himself on having friends across the political spectrum, says he has been muting even close friends who espouse anti-Zionist views. “I don’t need the emotional distress,” he told The Free Press. “If there’s someone who is truly my friend, it makes me feel that they very much don’t understand who I am as a person.” He’s cut out people he had invited to dinner at his home, and who he had trusted around his family and children.

“There’s a line in the sand, which is Israel,” he said.

Nate Clark, 34, lives in Virginia. He’s marched for gay rights, and in 2020, for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers in his home state. He said his choice to stand up for others is rooted in his Jewish identity.

“As a Jew, I feel like it would be weird if I went to Germany and took a right turn down Hitler Avenue or saw a statue of Eichmann, and then hear people claim ‘Oh, it’s our history. We’re just proud of our history’?” he told me.

Since October 7, he’s found himself “politically homeless”.

September 20, 2023

Christian views on men and women

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith discusses Brian Patrick Mitchell’s Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female:

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

John: You know dear, we’ve been writing this book review Substack for eight months now, ever since that crazy New Year’s resolution of ours, but we still haven’t done “the gender one”. And I feel like we have a real competitive advantage at this, since both sides of the unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the sexes are represented here. So let’s settle some of the eternal questions: Can men and women be friends? Who got the worse deal out of the curse in the Garden of Eden? And what’s up with your abysmal grip strength anyway?

I was perplexed by these and other questions, but then I picked up this book on the theology of gender, and it all got a lot clearer. The author is Deacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, an Eastern Orthodox clergyman and retired military officer. In a previous life, Mitchell testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces and then followed that up with a book called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, so he’s been interested in the differences between men and women for a while.

People have been observing for centuries that Christianity can be a little bit schizophrenic on the subject of gender relations. From the earliest days of the Apostolic era, there are two strains in evidence within Christianity: one which shores up the gender divisions common to most agricultural societies, and another which radically transcends them. Oftentimes both strains are visible within a single person! Thus you have the Apostle Paul on the one hand saying in his letter to the Ephesians:

    Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

But then in Galatians:

    There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

For as long as Christianity has existed, there have been people emphasizing one of these tendencies as the “true” Christian message on gender while attempting to minimize the other. Sometimes these arguments are interesting and sometimes they bring out something important (I’m a fan of Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People on the one side, and of Toby Sumpter’s fiery homilies on the other), but I think in both cases they’re falling into the error of trying to simplify something that is actually complicated. There’s a certain kind of person who can’t handle inconsistency, and that kind of person is going to have trouble with Christianity, because to a finite being the products of an infinite mind will sometimes appear inconsistent. Does Christianity want women to be subject to men, or does it want men and women to transcend their natures? The answer is very clearly both.

Mitchell’s book is compelling because it doesn’t try to minimize or hide one of these tendencies, but acknowledges up front that they’re both there and both have to be struggled with. It then advances the novel (as far as I know) argument that these two tendencies with regard to gender relations actually reflect the two major ethnic and cultural influences on the early Church: Hebrew and Greek.

The ancient Hebrew attitudes towards male and female are apparent from the beginning of the Bible: God creates Eve from out of Adam’s rib, and she is called Woman because she was taken out from Man. Thus the woman is subordinated to the man, yet fundamentally made of the same stuff as him. God calls the division of humanity into men and women good, He blesses families and helps barren women conceive, He commands His people to be fruitful and to multiply, and He promises Abraham that his seed shall be numbered as the stars of heaven. The entire Old Testament is a story of families, sometimes dysfunctional families, but families nonetheless, as opposed to lone men roaming the earth as in the Iliad or Bronze Age Mindset. Male headship is assumed, but it’s also assumed that men are fundamentally incomplete without something that only women can give them: a home, a future, and the thing that makes both, children.

So in Mitchell’s telling, the Hebrew legacy is responsible for the more “trad” side of early Christianity. What about the Greeks? Well we already discussed in our joint review of Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City how ancient Greek society was basically the world of gangster rap: honor, boasting, violence, women as trophies, women as a way of keeping score, women torn wailing from the arms of their parents or husbands and forced into marriage or concubinage or outright slavery. You will be shocked to learn that this culture did not hold a high opinion of women, procreation, or the marital union. Greek philosophy is a massively complicated and diverse beast, but there’s a strong tendency within it to associate women with physicality, nature, and brute matter, and to disdain all of these things in favor of rationality, spirit, and the intellect (all coded as male).

Our readers are probably thinking, “Hang on a minute, I thought the Hebrews were the patriarchal ones, do you mean to say that the hyper-masculine and hyper-misogynistic culture was the one that decided maleness and femaleness didn’t matter?” Well yes I do, and it’s pretty easy to see why if one hasn’t been totally brainwashed by modernity, but maybe it’ll be more convincing if a woman explains it to them.

Jane: Well, I think you gave a pretty accurate description of actually-existing ancient Greek culture, but we have to remember that the Church Fathers weren’t classicists poring through the corpus trying to accurately characterize the past. Rather, they were men of late antiquity, mostly educated in a “Great Books” canon heavy on the classical philosophy — and the worldview of philosophers is often quite different from the general norms and presuppositions of their society as a whole. (Not that modern — by which I mean post-1600 — classicists have always recognized this; E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational is considered a seminal work of classical scholarship precisely because it undercuts a long tradition of taking the philosophers as representative of their culture rather than in conflict with it.)1 So the direct influence on early Christians wasn’t the world Fustel de Coulanges describes (which covers roughly the Greek Dark Ages through the Archaic period), but the texts of the period that came after, as interpreted by an even later era. It’s a bit like looking at our contemporary small-l liberals, who draw heavily on a tradition that rose out of Enlightenment philosophy, which in turn was an outgrowth of and/or reaction to the medieval and early modern worlds: they’re not not connected to all that, but Boethius is not going to be the most helpful context for reading Rorty. You should probably look at Locke instead.


May 2, 2023

QotD: The musical importance of the city of Córdoba

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience?

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice — but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain.

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD.

I will make a case that medieval Córdoba had more influence on global music than any other city in history. That’s probably not something you expected. But even if you disagree — and I already can hear some New Yorkers grumbling in the background — I think you will discover that the “Córdoba miracle,” as I call it, is an amazing role model for us.

It’s a case study in how communities foster the arts — and in a way that benefits everybody, not just the artists.

[…] a thousand years before New Orleans spurred the rise of jazz, and instigated the Africanization of American music, a similar thing happened in Córdoba, Spain. You could even call that city the prototype for all the decisive musical trends of our modern times.

“This was the chapter in Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side,” asserts Yale professor María Rosa Menocal, “and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.”

There’s even a word for this kind of cultural blossoming: Convivencia. It translates literally as “live together.” You don’t hear this term very often, but you should — because we need a dose of it now more than ever. And when scholars discuss and debate this notion of Convivencia, they focus their attention primarily on one city: Córdoba.

It represents the historical and cultural epicenter of living together as a norm and ideal.

Even today, we can see the mixture of cultures in Spain’s distinctive architecture, food, and music. These are both part of Europe, but also separate from it. It is our single best example of how the West can enter into fruitful cultural dialogue with the outsider — to the benefit of both.

Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.

March 29, 2023

QotD: Sacrifice

As a terminology note: we typically call a living thing killed and given to the gods a sacrificial victim, while objects are votive offerings. All of these terms have useful Latin roots: the word “victim” – which now means anyone who suffers something – originally meant only the animal used in a sacrifice as the Latin victima; the assistant in a sacrifice who handled the animal was the victimarius. Sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrificium, with the literal meaning of “the thing made sacred”, since the sacrificed thing becomes sacer (sacred) as it now belongs to a god, a concept we’ll link back to later. A votivus in Latin is an object promised as part of a vow, often deposited in a temple or sanctuary; such an item, once handed over, belonged to the god and was also sacer.

There is some concern for the place and directionality of the gods in question. Sacrifices for gods that live above are often burnt so that the smoke wafts up to where the gods are (you see this in Greek and Roman practice, as well in Mesopotamian religion, e.g. in Atrahasis, where the gods “gather like flies” about a sacrifice; it seems worth noting that in Temple Judaism, YHWH (generally thought to dwell “up”) gets burnt offerings too), while sacrifices to gods in the earth (often gods of death) often go down, through things like libations (a sacrifice of liquid poured out).

There is also concern for the right animals and the time of day. Most gods receive ritual during the day, but there are variations – Roman underworld and childbirth deities (oddly connected) seem to have received sacrifices by night. Different animals might be offered, in accordance with what the god preferred, the scale of the request, and the scale of the god. Big gods, like Jupiter, tend to demand prestige, high value animals (Jupiter’s normal sacrifice in Rome was a white ox). The color of the animal would also matter – in Roman practice, while the gods above typically received white colored victims, the gods below (the di inferi but also the di Manes) darkly colored animals. That knowledge we talked about was important in knowing what to sacrifice and how.

Now, why do the gods want these things? That differs, religion to religion. In some polytheistic systems, it is made clear that the gods require sacrifice and might be diminished, or even perish, without it. That seems to have been true of Aztec religion, particularly sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl; it is also suggested for Mesopotamian religion in the Atrahasis where the gods become hungry and diminished when they wipe out most of humans and thus most of the sacrifices taking place. Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).

We’ll come back to this idea later, but I want to note it here: the thing being sacrificed becomes sacred. That means it doesn’t belong to people anymore, but to the god themselves. That can impose special rules for handling, depositing and storing, since the item in question doesn’t belong to you anymore – you have to be extra-special-careful with things that belong to a god. But I do want to note the basic idea here: gods can own property, including things and even land – the temple belongs not to the city but to the god, for instance. Interestingly, living things, including people can also belong to a god, but that is a topic for a later post. We’re still working on the basics here.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.

July 1, 2022

The Early Emperors – Part 6: The Birth of Christianity

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 27 Dec 2021

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

June 20, 2022

Criminal justice reform

At Time Well Spent, an interview with Charles Fain Lehman that considers the divergence between “what everyone knows” (based on how or if the media reports on an issue) and reality in the criminal justice system:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I want to really dive into your work at City Journal and elsewhere because you’ve produced some of the most informative and sensible material on crime and crime policy I’ve found online, but before that I’m wondering: where does your interest in crime reporting come from, and what inspires you to keep going in the wake of what seems like a pro-crime movement capturing our newsrooms, elite colleges, and preeminent government institutions? You were the first person to support my interest in converting to Judaism as a black dude (as I mentioned in our dms), and so I have to ask also if Jewish culture centralizes the importance of issues of public safety in some way? Let’s get into it.

In some senses, my interest in crime is just a product of my natural contrarianism — I am rarely satisfied with the popular explanation. When I first started out as a reporter (at the Washington Free Beacon), I focused on domestic policy broadly, which I still do to some extent. I have a fluency with numbers, and so my first intuition was to dig into publicly available data. What I regularly found was that data about the criminal justice system simply did not align with the account of reality pushed by the criminal justice reform movement. Books like The New Jim Crow and documentaries like Thirteen give the impression that most people are in prison for marijuana possession on trumped up mandatory minima, all at the behest of the private prison-industrial complex. In reality, the majority of offenders are in prison for murder, marijuana possession is barely an asterisk in prison populations, mandatory minima explain little of the growth in prison populations, and few prisoners are held in private prisons at all. So I began to develop the sense that perhaps the story popular with people, even conservatives, my age was not precisely up to snuff.

The other issue that I think started me down the road to my “tough on crime” stances today was learning about death penalty abolitionism. I wrote a long essay (unfortunately never published) about the death of Clayton Lockett, who was executed in Oklahoma with a drug called midazolam, which lead to a fairly horrible death. What became apparent to me in researching the piece is that Oklahoma only used midazolam because anti-death-penalty activists had lobbied pharmaceutical firms to stop selling more reliable drugs, namely pentobarbital and thiopental, to states, forcing them to switch to less reliable methods. This sort of unintended consequence is actually a common theme across abolitionist activism. For example, in 2019 the Supreme Court blocked the execution of Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old man whose lawyers argued that dementia rendered him incompetent for execution. But of course, Madison only developed dementia because he’d been awaiting execution for literal decades, since he murdered a police officer in 1985.

These may seem like fairly specific issues, but I think they can allow us to identify a common theme with the progressive current in criminal justice reform, namely a belief that “justice” is primarily a concern of the accused — protecting his rights, defending him against the state, etc. Values like due process are, of course, important. But our discourse obfuscates entirely the basic fact that most criminals have committed heinous acts, and that the first responsibility of justice is to redress those harms through punishment. I am motivated, in other words, by a basic belief that justice matters, and that many reformers, in their zeal for fairness or equity or whatever, actively undermine the pursuit thereof.

I don’t think this is consciously a Jewish attitude, which is to say I don’t think I came to this sentiment because I was taught at some point that this is what Jews believed. That said, I tend to think the view that one of the ways that Judaism is distinguished from Christianity is the primacy of justice in the former, compared to the primacy of mercy in the latter. To the Christian, everyone is a sinner, and so the differences between me and the death row prisoner are ontologically trivial. (A view like this I think motivates someone like the Atlantic‘s Liz Bruenig, whom I credit as one of the few honest death penalty opponents, even as I disagree with her.) Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law: God says that these things ought to be done, and to live well is to do them. Of course, Judaism thinks a great deal about the balance of justice and mercy — the Talmud blunts the Torah‘s death penalties, for example. But Judaism always proceeds from the view that there are laws which should be respected, and that violating those laws requires consequences. So in that regard, I suspect that my views are inflected by Judaism. And indeed, coming around to those views I think helped me to think more about Judaism, too.

June 16, 2022

Secret Foods of the Spanish Inquisition

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Feb 2022

Support the Channel with Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
Merch ► crowdmade.com/collections/tastinghistory
Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/tastinghist…
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/TastingHistory1
Tiktok ► TastingHistory
Reddit ► r/TastingHistory
Discord ► https://discord.gg/d7nbEpy
Amazon Wish List ► https://amzn.to/3i0mwGt
Send mail to:
Tasting History
PO Box 766
Burbank, CA 91503

LINKS TO SOURCES**
A Drizzle of Honey by David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson: https://amzn.to/3gyf0CY
The Spanish Inquisition by Henry Kamen: https://amzn.to/3B9EbVX

RECIPE
1 cup (160g) dried fava beans
1 cup (180g) dried chickpeas
2 1/2 lbs or 1kg beef
¼ cup (60ml) Olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
1 large onion diced
1 quart (1L) beef broth or water
2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
2 teaspoon ground caraway
2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
2 Eggplant, peeled and chopped
A large handful of chard leaves

1. Coat the eggplant in salt, cover, and set aside for several hours.
2. Boil the fava beans and chickpeas in a large pot for 2 minutes, then drain and set aside. In the same pot, heat half of the olive oil over medium heat then, add the onions and half of the salt and cook until lightly brown, about 8 minutes. Remove the onions and add the beef to the empty pot with the rest of the oil and salt. Cook until lightly brown, about 5 minutes. Add the onions back in as well as the beef broth/water. Bring to a simmer and cover, letting the stew simmer for 1 hour.
3. Drain and rinse the eggplant, then add it into the pot along with the fava bean, chickpeas, and spices. Cover and let cook for another 2 hours.
4. Chop the chard, then pound it flat with a rolling pin, and add it into the pot. Set the pot into the oven at 200°F and cook overnight (or at least 6 hours). Alternately, you can transfer the adafina to a slow cooker overnight. Serve alone or over rice.

**Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Tasting History will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Each purchase made from these links will help to support this channel with no additional cost to you. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available.

Subtitles: Jose Mendoza | IG @ worldagainstjose

#tastinghistory #jewishcooking #spanishinquisition

May 17, 2022

History of Rome in 15 Buildings 09. The Arch of Constantine

toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018

The many statues and reliefs from older monuments integrated into the Arch of Constantine – the focus of this ninth episode of our History of Rome – advertise the continuity of traditional Roman values into the fourth century. The Arch’s inscription, however, alludes to the religious revolution set in motion by the first Christian emperor.

If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:

https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…

If you’re so inclined, you can follow me elsewhere on the web:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/

To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/the-arch-of-c…

May 10, 2022

Canadian Armed Forces considering banning Islamic, Jewish, and Christian chaplains for their racist, misogynistic, and bigoted beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When an organization goes woke, there’s no halfway measures … it’s all-woke, all the time. Recently the Canadian Armed Forces received a report that could result in current chaplains being forced to resign their commissions because their religious beliefs “are not aligned with those of the Defence Team”. One wonders how future recruiting efforts will go with believing members of those faith-based communities who are potentially going to be explicitly described as “racist, misogynistic, and bigoted”:

Calling other parties racist in the House of Commons is bad. Calling whole religions and their adherents racist, misogynist and bigoted is worse

And yet, this government is being called to support one of the most egregious examples of anti-religious sentiment I have ever seen in Canada, and it was published by the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination. This document is supposed to advise the Canadian Armed Forces on racism and discrimination in the military and, if the government were to follow through on its recommendations, it would effectively disqualify chaplains from Canada’s largest faith groups.

In its final report, this panel recommends that the military should “not consider for employment as spiritual guides or multi-faith representatives Chaplaincy applicants affiliated with religious groups whose values are not aligned with those of the Defence Team.”

As you read the document, it quickly becomes clear that their understanding of “values” appear to be completely ignorant of the actual practice of the very religions they defame. Yet the report would disqualify clergy from — at the very least — the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) under the grounds that these faiths are inherently discriminatory.

Not content to deal with actual cases of misogyny, sexism and discrimination, the government’s panelists have taken a go at determining which beliefs and philosophies are acceptable in Canada’s new modern military.

“The Advisory Panel has observed that there are varying degrees of misogyny, sexism, and discrimination woven into the philosophies and beliefs of some mainstream religions currently represented in the cadre of chaplains in the CAF,” the report says.

Then it gets worse.

The Crusades: Part 4 — Life in Outremer

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 11 Feb 2021

The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

November 13, 2021

Creation of Israel

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cold War
Published 1 Jun 2019

Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on the creation of Israel, Zionist movement, reactions and diplomatic maneuvers of other states and the build-up to first Arab-Israeli war

Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress