Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Sept 2023The Byzantines (Blue’s Version) – a project that took an almost unfathomable amount of work and a catastrophic 120+ individual maps. I couldn’t be happier.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
“Byzantium” I, II, and III by John Julius Norwich, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome by Anthony Kaldellis, The Alexiad by Anna Komnene, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel, Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. I also have a degree in classical civilization.Additionally, the most august of thanks to our the members of our discord community who kindly assisted me with so much fantastic supplemental information for the scripting and revision process: Jonny, Catia, and Chehrazad. Thank you for reading my nonsense, providing more details to add to my nonsense, and making this the best nonsense it can be.
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January 13, 2024
History RE-Summarized: The Byzantine Empire
January 10, 2024
The problem of engaging with “the great classical works”
The first book review for 2024 at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf is a look at Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus by John Psmith:
It is easier, given his nature, for a human being to rule all the other kinds of animals than to rule human beings. But when we reflected that there was Cyrus, a Persian, who acquired very many people, very many cities, and very many nations, all obedient to himself, we were thus compelled to change our mind to the view that ruling human beings does not belong among those tasks that are impossible … We know that Cyrus, at any rate, was willingly obeyed by some, even though they were distant from him by a journey of many days; by others, distant by a journey even of months; by others, who had never yet seen him; and by others, who knew quite well that they would never see him. Nevertheless, they were willing to submit to him.
I am not well-read in the classics. My excuse ultimately boils down to the same argument that all the classicists give for why you should be well-read in the classics: reading a book that has been widely admired for a very long time isn’t just reading a book, it’s entering into a “great conversation” taking place across the aeons. I feel awkward reading a book like that without knowing something about the commentaries on the book, all the people it has influenced, all the people who influenced it, the commentaries on the commentaries, and so on. It’s exhausting and overwhelming, and when I ignore all that and plunge ahead, I often don’t enjoy the book and then I feel dumb. A “great conversation” sounds nice, but only if you’re one of the participants and you actually get the inside jokes and references. Otherwise it’s as alienating and isolating as showing up to a party where you don’t know anybody, and where everybody else has already been chatting for a few thousand years.
I don’t remember who recommended Xenophon’s Cyropaedia to me or how it wound up on my reading list, but when it finally made its way to the top of my stack, I saw it and shuddered. How could I possibly appreciate this semi-fictionalized biography of the founder of the Persian Empire without first being familiar with Xenophon’s work as a mercenary for one of Cyrus the Great’s distant descendants? Or with all the ways he was riffing on and responding to the political philosophy of his frenemy Socrates? Or with the complicated politics of the Peloponnesian War, and the way that Xenophon, an Athenian exile and the original Sparta-boo, was actually writing PR for King Agesilaus II, but concealing it within a story about the exotic Persians?1 Or with how this book led to the creation of an entire major genre of books in the Middle Ages? Or with the most famous and subversive instance of that genre, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and with all the hundreds of subsequent works reacting and responding to that one?
You see the problem? One could very easily conclude that it would be impossible for me to appreciate this book. Fortunately, I ignored all that and read it anyway. No doubt I missed all kinds of subtle layers of meaning and nuance, but even read on a totally superficial level by an ignoramus, this book rocks.
The title has the word “education” in it, but the book covers Cyrus’s entire life and reign, and only the first section concerns his education in the literal sense. That first section is very important to what comes next, though, so I’m going to dwell on it a bit. Cyrus, along with the other Persian boys of his social class, is being trained to lead. And so their education is centered around having lots of opportunities to judge, instruct, and coerce others; but also opportunities to serve and obey. If you’re old enough, you might remember when the education of the American leadership class worked this way too, but even those of you who are younger have seen vestiges of it in the bizarrely disproportionate weight given to extracurriculars in US college admissions.
1. If you’re an American, then you’re already familiar with this trick. Most of our debates about the virtues and vices of other nations are just thinly-veiled attempts to “own” domestic political opponents.
January 5, 2024
Qatar’s Aggies
In The Free Press, Eli Lake discusses the deal between Texas A&M and the Qatari government that gives the Qatar Foundation — run by the Qatari royal family — full ownership of any intellectual property developed at the Qatari campus of the university:
Texas A&M’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center in College Station, Texas.
Photo via Texas A&M
What does Qatar get for its investment in U.S. universities? The answer may surprise you. In addition to the prestige and the influence of affiliating one’s national philanthropy with elite schools, Qatar is also accumulating the kind of technical research that was once the prize of American universities.
Consider Texas A&M University, one of the best places in the country to study nuclear engineering. Last month, The Free Press obtained exclusive access to a copy of the latest contract between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation that shows all of the intellectual property developed at the university’s campus in Doha belongs to the Qatar Foundation, a national philanthropy owned by the country’s royal family.
“The Qatar Foundation shall own the entire right, title, and interest in all Technology and Intellectual Property developed at (Texas A&M University Qatar) or under the auspices of its Research Program, other than those developed by non-TAMUQ employees and without financial support from the Qatar Foundation or any of its affiliates,” says the contract, dated May 25, 2021.
This kind of arrangement is common for large research universities in America. But TAMUQ is not your ordinary university. It is entirely funded by the Qatar Foundation. Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, told me that Qatar “pays for all faculty and staff salaries” as well as the physical campus, labs and equipment, housing, transportation, and travel allowances for professors.
It’s no small matter. The intellectual property generated by Texas A&M University in Qatar, or TAMUQ, includes highly sensitive research in a variety of fields ranging from computer science to bioengineering. Last year, TAMUQ inked an agreement to develop projects with a subsidiary of Barzan Holdings, Qatar’s largest arms manufacturer.
Andre Conradie, the CEO of the joint venture between Barzan and Germany’s Rheinmetall, said at the time, “This partnership will encourage the development of technological and operational capabilities to enhance military protection.”
As one of the country’s premier schools in nuclear engineering, Texas A&M has access to two nuclear reactors in Texas not affiliated with the U.S. government. In December, the National Nuclear Security Administration renewed a contract for the university, along with the University of California and Battelle Memorial Institute, to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which involves oversight of teams who design and maintain nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.
December 13, 2023
“Harvard stands firmly behind President Claudine Gay”
Chris Bray discusses the sure-to-be-continued saga of a plagiarist — who’s also a full-time water-carrier for terrorism — who happens (for the moment) to head HAMAS University Harvard University:
Harvard stands firmly behind President Claudine Gay, a remarkably undistinguished scholar and academic leader who has been lavishly overpraised and promoted beyond her ability for three decades. They do this, they have just explained, because Harvard is deeply committed to a culture of academic freedom, open discourse, and cultural pluralism:
In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay. At Harvard, we champion open discourse and academic freedom, and we are united in our strong belief that calls for violence against our students and disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated. Harvard’s mission is advancing knowledge, research, and discovery that will help address deep societal issues and promote constructive discourse, and we are confident that President Gay will lead Harvard forward toward accomplishing this vital work.
And so here’s the tweet — I insist on still calling them tweets — in which Harvard announces that it has posted its public letter on its insistent promotion of open and constructive discourse:
We stand for open discourse! (Replies are closed.)
Coprophagiacs eat so much shit that it stops being shit, and just becomes the thing they eat. Every word of a statement from the enormously high-status trustees of an enormously high-status institution is just ludicrous. They self-refute, casually, without noticing.
Every day now, I think about a term that lawyers use: a colorable argument. If you have a colorable argument, you can file your lawsuit without being instantly thrown out of the courtroom. You may not have the winning argument, and you may not even have a really good argument, yet, but you have enough of an argument that you can start. Then, through the discovery process and with some luck and hard work, maybe you can build the actual winning argument. But for now, you have some not-totally-implausible factish claims, and you can more or less connect it all to a law of some kind, and you can walk into the courtroom without the judge bursting into laughter. You have a colorable argument; you have the bare minimum.
Look how much of the culture is made up of people who don’t have a colorable argument. Look how much total nonsense streams by.
Now, about those plagiarism allegations against the president of what is alleged to be one of the nation’s most prestigious universities:
With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles. At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.
She did absolutely nothing wrong, and that’s why she’s requesting corrections on 18% of her exceptionally thin scholarly record. No big deal, she’s just correcting “citations and quotation marks that were omitted”. Who omitted them? That’s the wrong question, see, because what happened is just that they “were omitted”. The quotation marks didn’t insert themselves. I demand that the quotation marks be denied tenure for wandering away from the page!
December 12, 2023
Canadian politics – if you don’t like something, call it some kind of “genocide”
Tristin Hopper on the political mis-use of the technical term “genocide”, to the point that it’s almost become routine to describe something you oppose as a “genocide”:
Victims of genocide
Photo by Cantetik2 via Wikimedia Commons.
In recent weeks, it’s become popular among Canada’s activist groups and even mainstream politicians to accuse Israel of “genocide”. In a since-deleted Thursday evening social media post, for one, NDP MP Don Davies accused Israel of “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. The United Church of Canada has also begun using the g-word in its official literature.
The charge doesn’t hold up on any material grounds. Unlike most genocided people, the Palestinian population has been soaring dramatically ever since the 1960s — all while retaining their traditional language and religion. Israel’s prosecution of its current conflict against Hamas, meanwhile, has featured any number of factors that are markedly out-of-step with an attempted genocide, including detailed evacuation orders and a rate of civilian casualties markedly lower than the global average.
But the charge doesn’t need to make sense, because it turns out Canada has been abusing the term “genocide” for quite some time. Coined amidst the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, “genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of an entire demographic of people.
While the most notable genocides involve systematized mass-murder, it’s not a requirement. As per the official definition struck in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide can also include attempts to erase a people via birth control or indirect methods such as famine. It’s on these grounds that Canada has officially accused China of genocide regarding its Uyghur minority. Although Beijing is not mass-murdering the Uyghurs, they are rounding them up into “re-education” camps and mandating forced sterilization with the explicit intention of destroying the Uyghur way of life.
But among Western academic and activist circles, “genocide” has now been stretched to apply to almost anything, from emissions policy to the ethnic ratios in prisons. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of just how much of Canadian life has been accused of being genocidal.
November 20, 2023
QotD: Flax and linen in the ancient and medieval world
Linen fabrics are produced from the fibers of the flax plant, Linum usitatissimum. This common flax plant is the domesticated version of the wild Linum bienne, domesticated in the northern part of the fertile crescent no later than 7,000 BC, although wild flax fibers were being used to produce textiles even earlier than that. Consequently the use of linen fibers goes way back. In fact, the oldest known textiles are made from flax, including finds of fibers at Nahal Hemar (7th millennium BC), Çayönü (c. 7000 BC), and Çatalhöyük (c. 6000 BC). Evidence for the cultivation of flax goes back even further, with linseed from Tell Asward in Syria dating to the 8th millennium BC. Flax was being cultivated in Central Europe no later than the second half of the 7th millennium BC.
Flax is a productive little plant that produces two main products: flax seeds, which are used to produce linseed oil, and the bast of the flax plant which is used to make linen. The latter is our focus here so I am not going to go into linseed oil’s uses, but it should be noted that there is an alternative product. That said, my impression is that flax grown for its seeds is generally grown differently (spaced out, rather than packed together) and generally different varieties are used. That said, flax cultivated for one purpose might produce some of the other product (Pliny notes this, NH 19.16-17)
Flax was a cultivated plant (which is to say, it was farmed); fortunately we have discussed quite a bit about farming in general already and so we can really focus in on the peculiarities of the flax plant itself; if you are interested in the activities and social status of farmers, well, we have a post for that. Flax farming by and large seems to have involved mostly the same sorts of farmers as cereal farming; I get no sense in the Greco-Roman agronomists, for instance, that this was done by different folks. Flax farming changed relatively little prior to mechanization; my impression reading on it is that flax was farmed and gathered much the same in 1900 BC as it was in 1900 AD. In terms of soil, flax requires quite a lot of moisture and so grows best in either deep loam or (more commonly used in the ancient world, it seems) alluvial soils; in both cases, it should be loose, unconsolidated “sandy” (that is, small particle-sized) soil. Alluvium is loose, often sandy soil that is the product of erosion (that is to say, it is soil composed of the bits that have been eroded off of larger rocks by the action of water); the most common place to see lots of alluvial soil are in the flood-plains of rivers where it is deposited as the river floods forming what is called an alluvial plain.
Thus Pliny (NH 19.7ff) when listing the best flax-growing regions names places like Tarragona, Spain (with the seasonally flooding Francoli river) or the Po River Basin in Italy (with its large alluvial plain) and of course Egypt (with the regular flooding of the Nile). Pliny notes that linen from Sætabis in Spain was the best in Europe, followed by linens produced in the Po River Valley, though it seems clear that the rider here “made in Europe” in his text is meant to exclude Egypt, which would have otherwise dominated the list – Pliny openly admits that Egyptian flax, while making the least durable kind of linen (see below on harvesting times) was the most valuable (though he also treats Egyptian cotton which, by his time, was being cultivated in limited amounts in the Nile delta, as a form of flax, which obviously it isn’t). Flax is fairly resistant to short bursts of mild freezing temperatures, but prolonged freezes will kill the plants; it seems little accident that most flax production seems to have happened in fairly warm or at least temperate climes.
Flax is (as Pliny notes) a very fast growing plant – indeed, the fastest growing crop he knew of. Modern flax grown for fibers is generally ready for harvesting in roughly 100 days and this accords broadly with what the ancient agronomists suggest; Pliny says that flax is sown in spring and harvested in summer, while the other agronomists, likely reflecting practice further south suggest sowing in late fall and early winter and likewise harvesting relatively quickly. Flax that is going to be harvested for fibers tended to be planted in dense bunches or rows (Columella notes this method but does not endorse it, De Rust. 2.10.17). The reason for this is that when placed close together, the plants compete for sunlight by growing taller and thinner and with fewer flowers, which maximizes the amount of stalk per plant. By contrast, flax planted for linseed oil is more spaced out to maximize the number of flowers (and thus the amount of seed) per plant.
Once the flax was considered ready for harvest, it was pulled up out of the ground (including the root system) in bunches in handfuls rather than as individual plants […] and then hung to dry. Both Pliny and Columella (De Rust. 2.10.17) note that this pulling method tended to tear up the soil and regarded this as very damaging; they are on to something, since none of the flax plant is left to be plowed under, flax cultivation does seem to be fairly tough on the soil (for this reason Columella advises only growing flax in regions with ideal soil for it and where it brings a good profit). The exact time of harvest varies based on the use intended for the flax fibers; harvesting the flax later results in stronger, but rougher, fibers. Late-pulled flax is called “yellow” flax (for the same reason that blond hair is called “flaxen” – it’s yellow!) and was used for more work-a-day fabrics and ropes.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
November 18, 2023
Believe all women … unless they’re Israeli
In The Line, Kristin Raworth and Ariella Kimmel protest against the objectively pro-Hamas silence of so many feminist organizations about the terror attacks of October 7th:
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and committed the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. More than just a massacre, Hamas tortured their victims, including brutally raping women, young and old. Yet the silence of many women’s organizations and leading voices who stand tall, claiming to be “strong feminists”, is deafening.
When the #MeToo movement started, the mantra was “believe all women”. As high-profile women spoke out, the feminist movement stood with them. So why, in the wake of the most horrific terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which included rape, do these women not deserve the same solidarity?
A month later it is not just the complete silence of the women’s organizations that causes pain, it is the active justification and gaslighting of the Jewish community, which has including denying the truth of what happened on October 7th, by demanding proof, rather than believing survivors. Many may recognize these tactics as those used as abusers against their victims in cases of domestic and sexual violence, a tactic that has become known as “DARVO” — Deny, Attack, and Reverse, Victim Offender.
When reports first surfaced of the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, many of us took to Twitter, the only place where we knew to raise our voices. Immediately our replies were filled with folks who otherwise would believe survivors, but were seemingly comfortable demanding immediate forensic evidence in this case. Survivor accounts were not enough; even a video released by the Israeli government that painted a clear picture of Hamas’ brutality was not enough. Hamas terrorists themselves recounting their actions was not enough.
Sarah Jama, an MPP in Ontario, has gone so far to publicly state that the accounts of rape are a lie pushed forward by the “zionist lobby”.
We have seen people like Ghada Sasa, a former board member of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, going on a podcast and not just claiming that Hamas treated civilians fairly, but that Israel was to blame for the massacre at the Nova music festival.
Meanwhile member of Parliament Niki Ashton claimed that a “feminist government” would call for a ceasefire; yet she has not once condemned the use of rape by Hamas as a war crime. This is a highly selective read of feminism.
November 17, 2023
Israeli government responds strongly to Justin Trudeau’s accusations of deliberate killings of civilians
I guess the electoral calculus shows that there aren’t enough Jewish votes to be gained by backing Israel, so Justin Trudeau is going for the Islamic vote instead:
It’s not typical that an Israeli leader will issue an English-language excoriation of a friendly government in a time of war, but this week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an exception for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way,” said Netanyahu in a statement addressed to the Canadian leader. He added, “the forces of civilization must back Israel in defeating Hamas barbarism.”
.@JustinTrudeau It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust.
While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing …
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) November 15, 2023
Netanyahu was reacting to prepared remarks Trudeau delivered in B.C. where he accused Israel of killing “women, children and babies”. The statement — which did not place any blame on Hamas for the carnage — urged Israel to exercise “maximum restraint” as “the world was watching”.
It’s but the latest incident in an official Trudeau government response to the Israel-Hamas conflict that has been checkered by confusion, contradiction — and a noticeable alienation from Canada’s usual international allies.
In the first days after the Oct. 7 massacres, Canada was left out of a strongly worded joint statement issued by five fellow members of the G7.
“The terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy and must be universally condemned,” read the statement co-signed by the leaders of the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy and France. The statement then urged Israel to “set the conditions for a peaceful and integrated Middle East region.”
Ottawa explained that the statement was issued by Quint – an organization of five countries separate from the G7 that has never included Canada.
But while it might make sense for Quint to exclude its other G7 ally, Japan, it’s more conspicuous that the co-signers never called the G7 member with a substantial Jewish population and a lengthy history of diplomatic support for Israel.
And while Trudeau’s official reaction to the Oct. 7 massacres carried much of the same sentiments, it did include a routine equivocation absent from the Quint statement: Israel had a right to defend itself “in accordance with international law”.
November 15, 2023
Can we criticize the Climate Goblin now?
Brendan O’Neill asks if it’s allowed to criticized Greta “The Climate Goblin” Thunberg now:
Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being “on fire” may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be.
Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying “Stand with Gaza“. She turned Fridays for Future – where pious rich kids bunk off school to raise awareness about climate change – into “Justice for Palestine” stunts. And on Sunday, she made a climate protest in Amsterdam pretty much all about Palestine.
She invited activists to the stage. One was Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian studying in Amsterdam. It didn’t take German newspaper Bild long to discover that Ms Rachdan holds views which – how should we put this? – are not very pleasant. On Hamas’s pogrom, Ms Rachdan said: “This is finally Palestinians taking action [against] the occupation”. She’s dabbled in Holocaust denigration. She shared a blood-spattered graphic comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Nazis’ actions in Auschwitz. Repulsively, it implies the Jewish State is worse than the Nazis. Where 127 kids a day were killed in Auschwitz, 178 a day are currently dying in Israel’s war in Gaza, it alleges.
Shorter version: the Jews are more accomplished child-killers than even Hitler’s henchmen were. This is rank Holocaust relativism. Comparing the greatest crime in history to this horrendous war denudes that crime of its unique horror. It renders it ordinary. It was no big deal – just the same kind of thing you see on your TV screens every night from Gaza. The implication of moral equivalence between the Nazis’ minutely planned gassing of Jewish children and the deaths of Palestinian kids as a terrible byproduct of Israel’s war on Hamas is beyond immoral. It is the gravest of inversions, treating the Jewish State’s war against anti-Semitic mass murderers as indistinguishable from the Nazis’ acts of anti-Semitic mass murder.
Of course, there’s nothing to suggest Greta shares Ms Rachdan’s views. But isn’t her woke generation obsessed with “platforming”, with only rubbing shoulders with the perfectly politically correct and no one else? Indeed, Thunberg ostentatiously flounced out of the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year because it received funding from a firm that invests in fossil fuels. Take oil money and she’ll dodge you like the plague; describe an anti-Semitic pogrom as an act of resistance and she’s all over you like a cheap suit. Care to explain, Greta?
November 14, 2023
The deep cognitive dissonance of “Queers for Palestine”
In Quillette, Armin Navabi points out the utter absurdity of a group of self-identified queers actively supporting the terror organization running the Gaza Strip, which would execute as many of them as came within its power:
Leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestinians (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class, whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This facile view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the incoherent slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine“, emblazoned on banners brandished at anti-Israel rallies.
“Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlwind of criticism and ridicule, since LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world; and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized. Variations like “Chickens for KFC” and “Blacks for the KKK” highlight its proponents’ basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with those of the Islamic right they so readily champion.
The reality of the situation could not be starker. Though there is room for improvement in Israeli attitudes towards these issues, Israel is at the forefront of LGBT rights in the Middle East. In Israel, LGBT people are visible members of society with legal protections and civil rights, and are accepted by a plurality of its citizens.
Palestine is quite a different story. A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International‘s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.
Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing” — a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.
Another disconcerting element of “Queers for Palestine” is that the slogan popped up in prominent left-wing anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rallies in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attacks, before Israel had even had the chance to respond. There is no way to interpret this slogan and the surrounding leftist fervor except as a signal of support not merely for Palestine, but specifically for Hamas, a jihadist movement with the explicit aim of eradicating the state of Israel. It’s imperative to understand that Hamas, as detailed in its 1988 Covenant, is propelled by a fundamentalist Islamist ideology whose goal is not only to eliminate all Jews but to conquer the world — just like ISIS. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has stated on record, “The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors”.
Western support for Hamas, under the guise of support for Palestinian liberation, betrays an ignorance of the deep-seated radical Islamist ethos driving that organization, which, if left unchecked, would jeopardize the very freedoms cherished by LGBT people across the developed world. Anyone who doubts this should try being gay, bi, or trans in most of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) Muslim-majority countries. Almost all these nations have laws that criminalize both homosexuality and transsexuality, some of which carry the death penalty. Human Rights Watch’s report “Everyone Wants Me Dead” succinctly encapsulates in its title alone the perilous environment faced by LGBT individuals in these regions.
November 12, 2023
“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”
Andrew Sullivan on how our “elites” now live in a world that the renowned Oxford academic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson1 predicted in his writings a century and a half ago:
“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
The word “genocide” may be the one rendered most meaningless in our discourse. It has some steep competition, of course. “White supremacy” now means asking someone to show up on time. “Trauma” means being referred to with the wrong pronoun. And “genocide” can, among other things, mean debating experimental sex reassignment procedures for children. (Go look up #transgenocide on Twitter and weep.)
But the supporters of Hamas and of the Palestinians have seized the g-word with particular zeal. And who can blame them? There’s a real, adolescent frisson in accusing the victims of the worst genocide in modern history of being genocidal themselves. “Israel, we charge you with genocide” is a common chant in many of the pro-Palestinian protests. “Genocide Joe” has been trending on Twitter. Eight hundred artists signed an open letter calling the Israeli counteract in Gaza “a genocide”. Yale professor Zareena Grewal channeled much of the “decolonizing” left: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”.
It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide”, and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria. A State Department official tweeted that Biden is “complicit in genocide”. A UN official just quit his post, adding:
In just 4 weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power & then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women & children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools & hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? #Genocide.
The devastation in Gaza is horrifying to watch, worse than horrifying. Anyone who isn’t deeply troubled by the mass death has lost humanity. But the UN official, and all those echoing him, are full of it. The basic definition of “genocide” provided by the State Department is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
The key, defining thing here is the aim. Horrifying massacres may or may not be genocidal, depending on the intention. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, was devastating, but it was aimed at ending the war, not obliterating the Japanese people as a race. And if Israel were interested in the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, it has had the means to accomplish it for a very long time. And yet, for some reason, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories has exploded since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel proper have voting rights, and a key presence in the Knesset.
This is not to exonerate Israel entirely. I’ve had strong words for the Netanyahu governments over the years. And Israeli politicians, on the far right, have used foul rhetoric and deemed the Palestinians subhuman in some respects. Bibi swiftly suspended a rogue minister for saying a nuke could be dropped on Gaza. There are anti-Arab maniacs among the West Bank settlers and in Bibi’s cabinet. But a policy of Arab genocide? Please.
The only people actively and proudly engaged in genocide are Hamas. The marchers on the streets this weekend will not be opposing genocide; they will be defending its perpetrators. It’s right there in the Hamas founding charter:
[All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. … The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
This is not mere rhetoric. On October 7, we saw what genocide is in practice. Hamas didn’t kill civilians as a tragic consequence of attacks on military targets. Its torture and murder of Jewish civilians was its core mission. And if Hamas had the capacity, they would gladly enact a second Holocaust, and they have proudly said so, with even more sadism than the Nazis. They would kill every Jew they could.
1. Lewis Carroll, “an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871) and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.” (Wiki)
November 8, 2023
Details from the day of the Hamas terror attack on Israel
Matt Gurney in The Line:
On Nov. 6, one-month-less-a-day after the Hamas assault on southern Israel, I was one of a small number of journalists to receive a briefing by a senior Israeli government official at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Part of the briefing was the showing of a film, approximately 42 minutes long, that contained video and audio records of the attack. The sights and sounds came from many sources, including home security footage, survivor footage, surveillance cameras at private residences, military facilities and in public places, as well as cameras and Go-Pro-style body worn cameras carried by Hamas. Later in the film, we also see footage taken by Israeli first responders — some of it informally, via body worn cameras and smartphones, but some of it also deliberately and meticulously, as part of the documenting of the attack’s aftermath. The video also included audio portions of what the Israeli government claims is intercepted Hamas communications sent during the attack.
I have to preface this near the top: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the videos, or of the translations. I believe that the videos are authentic and the translations accurate — the latter is easier, since it has by now been shown to enough people that any false translations would have been noted by members of the audience, but I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and had to rely on the captions. As for the videos, while some of what I saw on Monday was new to me, other clips have already been shared widely on social media. There’s a decent chance you’ve seen some of them, too. For further disclosure, many of the clips are very short — a few seconds each. The Israelis said that in many cases, they are only choosing to release what the families of victims have agreed to allow to be shown. That’s an editorial decision, and I haven’t seen the unedited videos. I can’t tell you what I wasn’t shown.
So if you’re absolutely determined to find a way to discredit or dismiss everything I’m about to say, I’ll keep it easy for you. I saw what was presented to me, by Israel, and have little ability to independently confirm any of it.
If you’re interested in hearing what I saw, though, here it is.
I should start by telling you I don’t plan to dwell on all the atrocities or try to summarize the whole 42 minutes of carnage I watched in any kind of coherent sequence. It’s not that the atrocities aren’t important — they’re obviously the central point of the briefing for reporters, and what I was asked to bear witness to. My thinking is simply this: much of what I could tell you has been summarized elsewhere. The global media first saw this film, in Israel, two weeks ago; some of my Ottawa-based colleagues saw it last week. If you’re looking for a summary of the contents, those exist already. I don’t think you’d benefit from just another version of that, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy writing one. So in the main, I’ll avoid long, descriptive passages where I tell you what I saw. I’ll try to offer something different.
But first, let’s get this out of the way. I confess that I was afraid when the video started. Simple fear. Fear I’d crack, fear I’d have to look away, fear I’d somehow fail to meet the moment. I don’t know if that was a rational fear — what the hell does meeting the moment even mean? — but I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment I was asked to attend and said yes. As the film began, though, I found many of the videos less graphic than I’d feared, and actually less graphic than some of what I’d already seen and written about. No one should mistake me — the videos are graphic, some of them extremely so. But in many cases, the videos are taken from too far away or from an unsteady camera (particularly the body worn ones) and many of the worst gruesome details are thus obscured or missed.
Not all of them. Lord no, not all. But some. That helped.
November 3, 2023
QotD: The use of Epigraphy and Papyrology in interpreting and understanding the ancient and classical world
Let’s start with the most text-like subcategories, beginning with epigraphy. Epigraphy is the study of words carved into durable materials like stone or metal. For cultures that do this (so, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans: Yes! Gauls, pre-Roman Iberians, ancient Steppe nomads: No!), epigraphy provides new texts to read and unlike the literary texts, we are discovering new epigraphic texts all the time. The downside is that the types of texts we recover epigraphically are generally very limited; mostly what we see are laws, decrees and lists. Narrative accounts of events are very rare, as is the epigraphic preservation of literature (though this does happen, particularly in Mesopotamia with texts written on clay tablets). That makes epigraphy really valuable as a source of legal texts (especially in Greece and Rome), but because the texts in question tend to be very narrowly written (again, we’re talking about a single law or a single decree; imagine trying to understand an act of Congress renaming a post office if you didn’t [know] what Congress was or what a post office was) without a lot of additional context, you often need literary texts to give you the context for the new inscription you are looking at.
The other issue with epigraphy is that it is very difficult to read and use, both because of wear and damage and also because these inscriptions were not always designed with readability in mind (most inscriptions are heavily abbreviated, written INALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONATALL). Consequently, getting from “stone with some writing on it” to an edited, usable Greek or Latin text generally requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text, reconstructing missing words (based on the grammar and context around them) and making sense of what is there. Frankly, skilled epigraphers are practically magicians in terms of being able figure out, for instance, the word that needs to fit in a crack on a stone based on the words around it and the space available. Fortunately, epigraphic texts are published in a fairly complex notation system which clearly delineates the letters that are on the stone itself and those which have been guessed at (which we then all have to learn).
Related to this is papyrology and other related forms of paleography, which is to say the interpretation of bits of writing on other kinds of texts, though for the ancient Mediterranean this mostly means papyrus. The good news is that there is a fairly large corpus of this stuff, which includes a lot of every day documents (tax receipts! personal letters! census returns! literary fragments!). The bad news is that it is almost entirely restricted to Egypt, because while papyrus paper was used far beyond Egypt, it only survives in ultra-dry conditions like the Egyptian desert. Moreover, you have all of these little documents – how do you know if they are typical? Well, you need a very large sample of them. And then we’re back to preservation because the only place you have a very large sample is Egypt, which is strange. Unfortunately, Egypt is quite possibly the strangest place in the Ancient Mediterranean world and so papyrological evidence is frequently plagued by questions of applicability: sure we have good evidence on average household size in Roman Egypt, but how representative is that of the Roman Empire as a whole, given that Egypt is such an unusual place?
Outside of Egypt and a handful of sites (I can think of two) in England? Almost nothing. To top it all off, papyrology shares epigraphy’s problem that these texts are difficult and often require specialists to read and reconstruct them due to damage, old scripts and so on. The major problem is that the quantity of recovered papyrus has vastly outstripped the number of trained papyrologists, bottle-necking this source of evidence (also a lot of ancient papyri get traded on the antiquities black market, potentially destroying their provenance, and there is a special level in hell for people who buy black market antiquities).
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.
November 2, 2023
With progressive allies like these …
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”.
October 31, 2023
As we’re always told in a pious tone of voice, “violence never settles anything”
Chris Bray, ever the iconoclast, begs to differ:
One of the things everyone knows about Gaza is that the Israeli attack is just creating more violence, as the next generation of Palestinians watches the bombs fall. Inevitably, the story goes, the young are learning hate and rage, and will pay it forward. Here’s the upscale think tank version of the argument, under the headline, “Israel risks creating a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of Palestinians”:
What will remain of Gaza’s population, and among Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and inside Israel proper, will be a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of youth, none of whom were born or of voting age when Hamas was elected … As a result, Hamas’s self-declared raison d’etre — “resisting the [Israeli] occupation with all means and methods” — will only grow in the minds of Palestinian youth. This will render unsuccessful Israel’s attempts to eliminate Hamas militarily.
Here’s an example of the Twitter rando version, which you’ll see over and over again if you engage with social media at all:
But is that true? Without advocating for brutality, I find myself looking for historical examples and mostly coming up with the opposite. To start managing the “yes, but” up front, there are many ways of waging war, and the extractive nation-building warfare of an imperial constabulary — low-grade fighting, prolonged counterinsurgency without decisive violence — does seem to often lead to more violence and “blowback” over time. But what Israel is doing now in Gaza seems like something else entirely.
If this violence will create “the next generation of Hamas”, then the children of the Germans who were firebombed in Dresden and Hamburg should be constantly strapping on suicide vests and attacking Ramstein air base. After the Wounded Knee massacre, it shouldn’t be safe for white settlers to live near the Lakota, and South Dakota should be a hellscape. Or consider North Vietnam, which won its war: “The US carried out more than a million bombing raids during the 20-year conflict, dropping some 5 million tonnes of ordnance on the Southeast Asian country.” After the war, a substantial Vietnamese population resettled in California. Violence trains the next generation to hate, right? So the Vietnamese must constantly attack Orange County.
The horror of total war has mostly not seemed to produce more violence. It seems to have mostly left later generations brutalized and horrified, and highly unlikely to go on fighting. Waging war decisively seems to be historically … decisive? The experience of crushing defeat seems to be a cycle-breaker, and even a horrifyingly costly victory — as for the North Vietnamese — seems to limit the appetite of next generations for more war.
Japan nurtured a profoundly violent warrior culture for a long time, with the nation’s soldiers serving as brutal invaders and horrible occupiers, then faced a ghastly campaign of firebombing and two nuclear bombs. Japan no longer has a brutal martial culture; the next generations didn’t become the new warriors. The currently popular theory says that they had to: the children witnessing this horror will be the next generation of militants, because trauma teaches violence. Tomorrow’s Hamas comes from today’s JDAMs. The people who lost World War II don’t seem to prove that theory.
Someone is going to say in the comments that I have blood on my fangs, but the point isn’t to cheerlead for the killing in Gaza. The point is to consider evidence about what comes next, and to ask what the comparable examples are. Is it factually true that youth, traumatized by war, become the violent next generation? We ran this experiment a lot in the twentieth century, and I think we have some strong hints at a consistent answer.
As Robert Heinlein had retired Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois say to his History and Moral Philosophy class in Starship Troopers:
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that “violence never settles anything” I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.
