All posts in category Violence

What you don’t know

On 29 April, USA Today published an op-ed in which former prosecutor Michael J Stern laid out several arguments against taking at face value Alexandra Tara Reade’s claim that Joseph R. Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. All of Mr Stern’s arguments are equally brilliant.

Consider point #7, “Compliments for Biden,” in which he declares that he finds it “bizarre” that Reade said positive things about Biden at various points in the years after the alleged assault. That leads to point #8, “Rejecting Biden, Embracing Sanders,” in which he denounces her for having made an “unbridled attack on Biden,” showing bias against him. So by saying positive things about Biden, Reade discredited her claim to have been abused by him; by saying negative things about Biden, she discredited her claim to have been abused by him. Stern is charitable enough to refrain from mentioning the many times over the years when she wasn’t talking about Biden at all, and explaining how they discredit her claim to have been abused by him.

The fact that, after Senator Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race, Reade supported Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign comes up again in point #11, “Suspect timing.” Reade timed the disclosure of her allegations to the maximum benefit of the Sanders campaign. By releasing her first public statement of her gravest charges against Biden on 25 March, three weeks after Super Tuesday and at the height of the public confusion surrounding Coronavirus, Reade ensured that they would not receive widespread attention until Sanders had withdrawn from the race and was trying to craft an endorsement of Biden that would deliver as many of his supporters as possible to the former vice president. Clearly, this was a gift to the Vermont senator.

Point #5, “Memory lapse,” is just as telling. After a mere 27 years, Reade claims to be unable to recall the precise date, time, and location within the corridors of the Senate office buildings where the alleged assault occurred. Stern derides this as “amnesia about specifics.” Surely, a shocking incident like that, coming entirely out of the blue, with no connection to any frame of reference she had established concerning Biden and her place on his staff and turning her world upside down in a matter of seconds, is the sort of thing that human minds process clearly and calmly. How could she not have the full details at her command?

Under point #2, Stern gives us “Implausible explanation for changing story.” This is just as much to his credit as are the other points. Reade claims that, when she told the Union newspaper of Nevada County, California in April of 2019 that Biden’s sexual misconduct towards her had extended to unwanted shoulder rubs and left out the part about his hand in her genitalia, she was intimidated by the reporter’s demeanor. Stern finds it “hard to believe” that a reporter for the Nevada County Union would be reluctant to run with a scoop in the form of a lone woman accusing the Democratic presidential front-runner of sexually assaulting her. As is well-known, all newspapers operate exactly like the ones in movies from the 1940s, and when reporters run into the press room with stories like that the editors shout “Hold the presses!” and all the staff toss their fedoras in the air so that the big cards labeled “Press” fall out of the hatbands.

Point #6, “The lie about losing her job,” is where Stern shows what a fine legal mind he has.  Reade at one point said she was fired, but at another point said that she quit because unreasonable demands were placed on her. Since the unreasonable demands in question were insistence that she act as a cocktail waitress at a party that would likely be attended by Biden’s friends Edward M Kennedy and Christopher Dodd, at a time when every staffer on Capitol Hill was aware of a story that Dodd and Kennedy had a few years earlier sexually assaulted a woman acting as a cocktail waitress might somehow be relevant to this issue if there were such a legal concept as “constructive dismissal,” covering cases where an employee is forced to quit.  But hey, there must not be any such concept! Stern is a lawyer of some kind, after all, and he’s obviously never heard of it.

Point #3, “People who contradict Reade’s claim,” is also very compelling. Stern lists three people who emphatically deny, not exactly Reade’s claim to have been sexually assaulted by Biden, but her claim that she filed a complaint about such an assault at the time. These three people are all very distinguished and credible. In those days, they all held top posts in the office of Delaware’s senior US senator. One of them was himself later appointed to the US Senate to succeed to succeed that senator, and all of them are likely to be among the most influential figures in Washington if the Democratic nominee is elected president this year. Also, they all know Joe Biden well, and say that he is the kindest warmest bravest most wonderful human being they’ve ever met, and that it is simply impossible for him to have done something like this. By golly, if that isn’t convincing evidence that ol’ Joe is a good egg, I don’t know what is!

If any doubt did remain about ol’ Joe’s fundamental goodness and decency, Stern’s point #14, “Lack of other sexual assault allegations,” should dispel it. Stern writes, “It is possible that, in his 77 years, Biden committed one sexual assault and it was against Reade. But in my experience, men who commit a sexual assault are accused more than once.” No doubt Stern’s experience as a prosecutor in Detroit and Los Angeles included many suspects who had been US senators since the age of 30 and whose alleged victims hoped to make careers in politics and government, so that’s a great point.

Point #4, “Missing formal complaint,” is so important, so important. Reade did not save a copy of the formal complaint she claims to have filed in 1993. It’s not as if Biden’s office would have saved a copy of such a complaint, or as if those papers are archived somewhere. Nope, the only way such a complaint will ever become public is if Reade herself has kept a copy of it.

Why would Reade omit such an important item from her records, knowing that Senate offices don’t have filing cabinets? Stern suggests an answer to that question in his point #10, obliquely titled “Believe all women?” He tells us that “Reade’s wild shifts in political ideology and her sexual infatuation with a brutal dictator of a foreign adversary raise questions about her emotional stability.” Yes indeed, we must always remember that women who have been sexually assaulted by powerful men and who have seen their hopes and dreams fall apart in consequence of such assaults are always models of emotional stability. Only someone who has not suffered such abuse would be so scatterbrained as to neglect to save a copy of the formal complaint she submitted concerning it.

Stern’s point #9 raises questions about whether Reade can really be considered educated at all. Under the heading “Love of Russia and Putin,” he cites an article in which Reade both says that she thinks Vladimir Putin is handsome, and that she is unconvinced by claims that Russian intelligence services interfered in the 2016 US presidential election to an extent that Russia should be considered hostile to the USA. As is well-known, Putin is not at all handsome, and all persons of true learning are amateur counter-espionage enthusiasts who attribute the election of Donald Trump to the machinations of the Kremlin. That Reade does not grasp these points raises the question of whether she could be trusted to correctly identify her assailant if she were in fact attacked. How can she be sure a Russian bot posting memes on Facebook didn’t attack her?

Point #12, “The Larry King call, and point #13, “Statements to others,” deal with secondhand reports of remarks Reade has made to various people at various times concerning her experiences with. The “Larry King call” was a call Reade’s mother made to the Larry King Show on CNN in 1993. Stern transcribes the whole thing:

I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

Stern says:

Given that the call was anonymous, Reade’s mother should have felt comfortable relaying the worst version of events. When trying to obtain someone’s assistance, people typically do not downplay the seriousness of an incident. They exaggerate it. That Reade’s mother said nothing about her daughter being sexually assaulted would lead many reasonable people to conclude that sexual assault was not the problem that prompted the call to King.

What a well-taken point! Reade’s mother had several seconds to lay out her case to King and his two guests before they hustled her off the phone to make a quick response and cut to commercial, more than enough time to present all the details in a way that would both preserve her daughter’s dignity and convey the seriousness of the matter. Very suspicious!

The “Statements to others” that Stern considers under point #13 include three people who said, when all she was telling the press was that Biden had touched her neck and shoulders inappropriately, that she had told them that in the 90s, and who, when she began to say that he had also grabbed her genitalia, then said that she had also told them about that part back in those days. Stern also mentions that she had given the press an “apparently exhaustive” list of people she had told about the incident in the 90s, and that those three people were not on that “apparently exhaustive” list. Reade doesn’t seem to have said that the list was exhaustive, but it was “apparently” so to the eagle eyes of Mr Ex-Prosecutor. Can’t fool him!

Under point #15, “What remains,” Stern remarks that no video recordings were made and that no other circumstantial evidence of the alleged incident survives, and there are no witnesses aside from Reade and Biden. Some prosecutors would say that, because all we have are two people, one of whom says X while the other says not-X, the legal system cannot come to any conclusion about what did or did not happen. Since many millions of people are at this moment weighing the question of whether to vote for Biden to be president of the United States, the lack of a conclusion to this question might be deeply troubling. Indeed, we could imagine criminal lawyers, whether prosecutors or defense counsel, coming up against the limits of what their profession allows then to classify as knowledge and feeling great unease.

No such anxieties cloud the mind of our gallant Mr Stern, however. He has produced his fifteen arguments, each as powerful as the next, to assure himself and all potential Biden voters that the allegations Ms Reade has brought are of little moment, and a vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee can be cast with the same placid conscience that prosecutors can bring to their work.

And so we end with Mr Stern’s first point: “Delayed reporting… twice.”   Who could possibly be reluctant to go to the authorities with a account of sexual assault, knowing that the professional fraternity that decides which cases will be brought is represented by so wise and reasonable a man as Mr Stern? Surely, no one can say that ours is a rape culture with men like him in charge.

by acilius on May 2, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2020, Rape
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on May 2, 2020

https://losthunderlads.com/2020/05/02/what-you-dont-know/

What would-be cyberbullies did in the 1930s

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William Joyce “was a tiny little creature and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so.” 

Lately I happened upon a copy of Rebecca West’s 1945 book The Meaning of Treason. Most of the book is about William Joyce, a British fascist rabble-rouser of the 1930s, who became famous during the Second World War when his propaganda broadcasts from Germany earned him the moniker “Lord Haw Haw” and led him to death on the gallows at Wandsworth Prison shortly after the war’s end.

The book is largely composed of reprinted articles that West wrote for The New Yorker while covering Joyce’s trial; this has its unfortunate results, as the book is weighed down both by the repetition of elements that are reintroduced for readers who had missed a previous week’s issue and by lengthy arguments about points that have not retained their interest over the decades. Still, there are marvelous bits; for example, when she describes seeing Joyce for the first time in a courtroom: “The strong electrical light was merciless to William Joyce, whose appearance was a surprise to all of us who had not seen him before. His voice had suggested a large and flashy handsomeness. But he was a tiny little creature and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so.”  (Page 4, Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason, Viking Press, 1945, 1948 [4th Printing])

The core of the book is contained in two long paragraphs towards the middle. I will quote those in their entirety, since they reflect not only on what William Joyce did between leaving Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1937 and defecting to Germany in 1939, but also on what a great many people who are more like him than they would perhaps care to admit spend their free time doing today:

Joyce, working alone, worked frantically. He spoke to every society that would let him inside its doors, in the warmer weather he had an open-air meeting every day, and sometimes several in one day. It was as if he were trying to leave an impression on the public mind that could be counted upon to endure; and indeed he partially succeeded in this aim. An enormous number of people in the low-income groups heard him speak, some during the years when he was with Mosley, and even more during the period when he was his own master. Many people in the higher-income groups had also their contact with Joyce, but they did not know it. Anybody who was advertised as a speaker at a meeting appealing for funds or humane treatment for refugees from Nazi persecution would receive by every post, for many days before the meeting, threatening messages, couched always in the same words, and those words always so vague that the writers of them could not have been touched by the law. They were apt to come by the last post, and the returning householder, switching on the light, would see them piled up on the hall table, splinters from a mass of stupidity that might not, after all, be finite and destructible, but infinite and coterminous with life. Their postmarks showed that they came from Manchester, Bristol, Bournemouth, Bethnal Green, Glasgow, Colchester. All over the country there were those who wished that the stranger, being hungry, should not be fed, being naked should not be clothed. Goats and monkeys, as Othello said, goats and monkeys; and the still house would seem like a frail and besieged fortress.

This device was the invention of William Joyce. The people who heard him in the streets sometimes saw this alliance with crime displayed. A number of his meetings were provocative of the violence he loved; he was twice tried for assault at London police courts during the year preceding the outbreak of the war, though each time the wind that sat in so favorable a quarter for Fascists blew him out with an acquittal. But at many others of his meetings he used all his powers, his harsh, sneering, cajoling, denatured, desperate voice, his quick and twisting humor, his ability to hammer a point home on a crowd’s mind, to persuade the men and women he saw before him of the advantages of dictatorship, the dangers of Jewish competition and high finance, the inefficiency of democracy, the greatness and goodness of Hitler, and his own seriousness. His audiences were not much interested in his arguments and were shrewd enough in their judgement of him. Many remembered him seven years afterwards. Only a very few said, “I liked him.” Most said, “He has the most peculiar views, but he really was an extraordinary chap,” or some such words. “Extraordinary” was what they called him, nearly all of them. This impression might not have served Joyce so ill had the days brought forth what he expected. If the Germans had brought him with them when they invaded England and had made him their spokesman, many Londoners might have listened to him with some confidence because he was a familiar element in a scene that conquest would have made terrifying in its unfamiliarity; and they might have felt awe, and perhaps, still more, confidence, because there was something of the wizard in the little creature.

(Pages 98-100)

What a marvelous way of expressing the effect of being a target of a campaign of harassment: “splinters from a mass of stupidity that might not, after all, be finite and destructible, but infinite and coterminous with life… and the still house would seem like a frail and besieged fortress.” And what effort and organizational ability it must have taken William Joyce and his fellows to inflict this on people in the days before the Internet. West’s description of the menacing letters “piled up on the hall table” suggests that the target of the threat has servants who bring her mail in for her, as the variety of postmarks indicate that Joyce had associates in his “National Socialist League” who helped him produce and distribute the letters. Nowadays, of course, Twitter has taken over all that work, acting as mailroom staff both among those issuing and those receiving threats.

by acilius on July 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized, Violence
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by acilius on July 26, 2019

https://losthunderlads.com/2019/07/26/what-would-be-cyberbullies-did-in-the-1930s/

Never attribute to strategic thought what can be adequately explained by mindless impulse

In the USA, physical attacks on such right-wing figures as Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnes and their supporters have brought those men so much publicity, and have done so much to embarrass and divide their left-wing opponents, that many suspect that the ostensible targets of these attacks in fact arranged them. Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has expounded this theory on his blog and on television:

Many degrees to Mr Reich’s left, Mike Whitney of Counterpunch considers the theory that the Berkeley incident was a set-up and is more cautious. Mr Whitney’s concern is that these events, whatever their origin, may provide just the cover our new philosopher-king needs to install an authoritarian state:

Trump’s governing style… is geared to deepen divisions, increase social unrest, and create enemies, real or imagined.  In this view, Berkeley was just a dry run, an experiment in perception management orchestrated to sharpen Trump’s image as the hair-trigger Biblical father who will intercede whenever necessary and who is always ready to impose justice with an iron fist.

So the masked rioters actually did Trump a favor, didn’t they? They created a justification for presidential intervention backed by the prospect of direct involvement. One can only wonder how many similar experiments will transpire before Trump puts his foot down and bans demonstrations altogether?

Of course, that may very well be the objective.

It is true that Mr Yiannopoulos, as an editor of the website for which Don John of Astoria’s Chief Strategist was for several years the Executive Chairman, is associated with people whose favorite tactic is tricking left of center types into saying horrible things, and plenty of left of center types have responded to these events by going on social media to gloat about a woman being pepper-sprayed in the face, a Starbucks being demolished, etc. So there is at least a measure of plausibility to the idea that the masked men who did those things when Mr Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak may have been his agents, and even to the idea that they may have been dirty tricksters with links to the White House. Plausibility isn’t evidence, so we oughtn’t to get excited, but it’s an idea to take note of.

As for Richard Spencer, someone who will do and say the kinds of things he has been doing and saying for the last nine years might do pretty nearly anything to get attention. Arranging to have himself punched in the face on television might be a pathetic cry for help, but a considerably less extreme version of the pathetic cry for help than was, for example, his decision to publish articles dwelling on the potential upsides of killing all black people. And Mr Spencer was also rewarded with vast publicity and confusion among his opponents for his minor discomfort. So again, while there may not be evidence or even presumption of evidence that Mr Spencer and his assailant may have been acting in collusion, neither is there a strong prima facie case against the idea.

I would put Gavin McInnes is a different category than Mr Yiannopoulos or Mr Spencer. Despite his efforts to market the phrase “Proud Boys” as a label for his followers, I do not believe that Mr McInnes actually has any followers. Readers, yes, he has many of those; I regularly read him myself, since he’s as funny as he is nasty (that makes him very funny.) But 11 people were arrested last week at the scene of the disturbance at New York University where Mr McInnes was pepper-sprayed in the face and several other people were assaulted; none of those people seems to have been likely to take direction from him, or for that matter from Mr Yiannopoulos or any other right-wing trickster, and I do not believe for one second that there are 11 people in the world who would agree to be arrested for Mr McInnes’ sake, let alone that he could assemble that number in one place.

If the goal of those who perpetrated these acts of violence was to trick left-leaning people into cheering them on, thereby making them look ridiculous and disgusting, they succeeded. Video of Kiara Robles being pepper-sprayed in the face while she tried to assemble her thoughts in defense of Mr Yiannopoulos’ appearance was shared many thousands of times on social media, often with gloating remarks. I’ve been surprised at people I know, who last year were lecturing everyone in sight about the terrible dangers that would face the social order if we rejected the preferred presidential candidate of Goldman Sachs and the CIA and embraced such wild-eyed revolutionaries as Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein, who today are extolling the virtues of the Black Bloc and jeering at those who doubt the necessity of political violence.

Nor is it only those on the left who are willing to believe that these actions will damage the causes that men like Mr Yiannopoulos, Mr Spencer, and Mr McInnes promote. As those who openly gloat over this violence and call for more of it are showing us the power of the hormonal rush that comes to fans when they watch their team attack the opposing team in their favorite sport, so there are those on the far right who believe that their failure to make the world work the way they think it ought to work is a symptom of the left’s use of such tactics. Steve Sailer has catered to this sort of thinking in several blog posts (for example, here and here,) though he himself has been careful to limit the number of factual claims to which he commits himself.

Paul Gottfried, a distinguished scholar who had the misfortune to be associated with Richard Spencer before Mr Spencer decided to go Nazi, suspects that violent efforts to suppress far-right speech may succeed, not in ending the careers of its ostensible targets, but in creating a general sense that the country is going out of control and thereby undermining confidence in its elected leaders, most of whom are right of center. While Mr Gottfried, unlike his least-favorite former student, is someone to be taken seriously, I would argue that he too has fallen prey to the thrills of partisanship. There was far more unrest on college campuses in the USA during Richard Nixon’s first term as president than there was during the Johnson-Humphrey administration; that unrest not only failed to stop Mr Nixon gaining a second term in one of the most lopsided election results in history, but it may well have contributed to that win. Indeed, incumbent governors and mayors whose jurisdictions saw heavy unrest did well throughout those years, provided they were seen as taking the toughest possible law and order stand. California governor Ronald Reagan, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo all benefited enormously from this kind of thing. Mr Gottfried knows this history well, and I can only suspect that his wish to cheerlead for dynamic action by his side has blinded him to its lessons.

If there are thousands, even millions, of people who are so caught up in the Go Blue! Go Red! cheering match to think that these actions somehow hurt the far right, then it is hard to doubt that there are a couple of dozen who are ready to put their fists and their Bear Mace where their Retweet buttons are. I am reminded of “Hanlon’s Razor,” the rule of analysis dictating that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” Of course the acts of violence against Ms Robles, Mr McInnes, etc, are malicious deeds, but we are not justified in assuming that the people who perpetrated those deeds were thinking strategically. Therefore we are not justified in believing that those perpetrators realized that their actions would help the far right and harm those whom the far right targets, however obvious that fact may be to everyone who isn’t carried away with left/ right team spirit. That’s why, in the title of this post, I rephrase Hanlon’s Razor as “Never attribute to strategic thought what can be adequately explained by mindless impulse.”

by acilius on February 6, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Politics, Violence

Posted by acilius on February 6, 2017

https://losthunderlads.com/2017/02/06/never-attribute-to-strategic-thought-what-can-be-adequately-explained-by-mindless-impulse/

At war with the Gray Goo

Several days ago, a man named Richard Spencer was on camera, finding artful ways to respond to questions as to whether he is an advocate of genocidal violence against black people (by the way, he is very much an advocate of genocidal violence against black people.)  While he did his shtick, a masked person ran up, punched him in the face, and ran off.

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You might think that a minor physical assault on a minor public nuisance would figure in the news as, at most, a single line on the police blotter. Yet people are still talking about it. Today, Freddie deBoer, Rod Dreher, and The Nation magazine all weighed in on this incident.

I tweeted about it the other day:

And pretty healthy odds at that; Spencer’s only job is to get publicity, and with this incident he has gained a tremendous amount of that, as he recently gloated when reached for comment by The Independent.

Since people are still talking about this, I’ll add a bit to that tweet. Street-fighting is one area where Nazis have consistently enjoyed success. To meet them on that ground is to play to their strengths.

That isn’t to say that Spencer commands a street-fighting force; he doesn’t. His followers are guys on the internet, the proverbial fat guy living in his mother’s basement.  “Failsons,” as Chapo Trap House calls them.   Those guys aren’t likely to be much use in a street fight. Nor can they attract support from people who have not already given up on life.

The threat they pose is like the danger people used to talk about regarding nanotechnology.  One tiny machine might impose only a very small ecological cost, but as the number of these in use multiplies, it becomes conceivable that they might collectively cause a very large amount of environmental damage.  In a worst case scenario, a vast number of nanobots might coalesce into a “Gray Goo” that would render the surface of the earth uninhabitable. The Failsons at their keyboards have, figuratively speaking, coalesced into blobs of destructive goo.

Failson blobs floating around a bloodthirsty racist like Spencer stink up the comments sections of blogs and other social media platforms. That isn’t such a problem in itself; it’s easy enough to ban commenters, as I have had occasion to demonstrate to some of you.  Where Spencer’s following has the most potential to do harm is illustrated by something like Gamergate. A few years ago a Failson blob of gamers set out to harass three or four women who had been making a marginal living writing online about video-games. They succeeded in making their lives miserable, and probably did a great deal to discourage other women from getting into gaming journalism. Spencer’s crowd would certainly be capable of targeting particular members of groups they don’t like (blacks, Jews, women, Muslims, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam) and doing the same damage to their lives that the gamers did to Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian, while intimidating other members of the same groups into silence.

To stick with the Gamergate analogy a moment longer, “Gray Goo” isn’t just a pejorative in discussing them. Supporters of the harassment of Quinn, Wu. and Sarkeesian called themselves a variety of names, including “the Grey Rebellion” and, most commonly, “Shitlords.” So if I were talking only about them, I might use the phrase “Gray Shit” rather than “Gray Goo.”

Punching people in the street isn’t going to drive the Failsons into hiding; as the trope about them living in their mothers’ basements indicates, they have been in hiding their entire lives. However, it will give Spencer and people like him an opportunity to recruit guys who like to express their hostilities, not by persecuting people from behind a computer screen, but in physical combat. Once they get a group of street-fighters going, that’s a whole new population from which they can draw support. And while street-fighters are as much a low-status population as are the couch-bound Failsons, physically violent people attract a following in ways that people whose aggressions are electronic do not. That’s why skinheads were a thing thirty years ago, to the point where there were anti-Nazi skinheads who would spend Friday nights fighting pro-Nazi skinheads.

The original Nazis, remember, kept going throughout all their electoral ups and downs in the 1920s as a street-fighting group. When the global economy collapsed at the end of that decade, Germany’s elite found that the only way they could restore public order and keep their positions was to put Hitler in charge. Hitler’s ascent had many pre-conditions; Germany’s defeat in World War War One, the mindlessly vengeful policies the victorious powers inflicted on Germany from November 1918 to January 1933, and the Great Depression were all bigger contributors to his rise than was the fact that he had an effective street-fighting force at his disposal. But that street-fighting force was certainly one of the contributors, and when I see leftists expressing pleasure at an event which, if it to have any consequence at all, can only have the consequence of building a street-fighting force loyal to Richard Spencer, I hope that the Trump years will not bring the kind of misery to the USA that the years of the Weimar Republic brought to Germany.

by acilius on January 25, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Fascism, Politics, Violence
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on January 25, 2017

https://losthunderlads.com/2017/01/25/at-war-with-the-gray-goo/

Never bring a knife to a clown fight

I just saw this on Twitter:

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I don’t advocate violence against clowns or anyone else. But if, hypothetically, one had to defend oneself against malevolent clowns, I’d think that a knife would be a poor choice of weapon. Clowns typically wear multiple layers of loose-fitting clothing, often with padding underneath, obstructing true thrust. Many clowns are accomplished magicians, far more likely than the average person to disarm an opponent in a knife fight. And many clowns are trained dancers, skilled at avoiding thrust. Since most knife fights require several successful strikes of the blade to terminate the threat from one’s opponent, those advantages make it quite unlikely that an untrained combatant would win a clear victory in a knife fight with a clown.

If this girl is correct in regarding clowns as so grave a threat to her well-being that she needs to carry a weapon, an assessment which I by no means endorse, I would advise her to carry something else, perhaps a heavy club or a spray bottle or something else where a single stroke is likely to disable an opponent. Her school probably has policies against 11 year olds carrying guns (though it is Georgia so maybe not,) so firearms really aren’t worth considering even if her threat-assessment is correct.

by acilius on September 22, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, Violence
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on September 22, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/09/22/never-bring-a-knife-to-a-clown-fight/

War for Helen?

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One of the less well-known legends of Helen’s later life, from Star Trek comics #9

The Classics blog Sententiae Antiquae has a post today about the story that the Trojan War was triggered by Queen Helen of Sparta running off with Paris, alias Alexander, a Trojan prince. The post quotes several ancient Greek authors, sketching a variety of ways in which the ancients crafted the tale and a variety of purposes which they used it to serve.

They quote Herodotus’ remarks about the story:

“If Helen really were in Ilium, they would have given her back to the Greeks whether Paris wanted them to or not. Priam was not so out of his mind, nor were his other subjects, that they would want to risk their own bodies and children and the city itself just so that Paris could sleep with Helen.”

εἰ ἦν Ἑλένη ἐν Ἰλίῳ, ἀποδοθῆναι ἂν αὐτὴν τοῖσι Ἕλλησι ἤτοι ἑκόντος γε ἢ ἀέκοντοςἈλεξάνδρου. οὐ γὰρ δὴ οὕτω γε φρενοβλαβὴς ἦν ὁ Πρίαμος οὐδὲ οἱ ἄλλοι οἱ προσήκοντες αὐτῷ, ὥστε τοῖσι σφετέροισι σώμασι καὶ τοῖσι τέκνοισι καὶ τῇ πόλι κινδυνεύειν ἐβούλοντο, ὅκως Ἀλέξανδρος Ἑλένῃ συνοικέῃ. 

(Book 2, chapter 110)

I offered this comment:

I’ve always been puzzled by the tradition that regards it as self-evidently absurd that a major war could have been sparked by something like Helen and Paris running off together. It sounds pretty plausible to me.

Had Priam known, as a certainty, that Menelaos and Agamemnon would raise the army Homer describes, lay siege to Troy for 10 years, and then destroy the city, probably he would have handed Helen over the minute Menelaos demanded her. The legend says that it took years to put the coalition together, so that first demand probably came from a military power that Priam could easily have defeated. For Priam to have complied with that demand would have been to present himself as a soft target to every power with designs on Troy.

Even if he had known that a vast army was coming after him and that they would defeat him, however, after that first minute had passed it would have become extremely difficult for Priam to surrender Helen. Every moment Helen was in Troy, a larger share of Priam’s prestige was invested in keeping her there. After just a few days, giving her up would have been a severe loss of face. And the way politics works, if you lose face severely enough, there’s no limit to what you can lose.

I think of the week that followed 11 September 2001. The USA demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden; some very well-informed people of my acquaintance were quite sure that bin Laden and his circle had planned and ordered the attacks without informing the Taliban leadership, but were also sure that the Taliban leaders would not comply with the American demand, even though they knew that refusing to do so would result in the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Afghanistan, because complying would invite out-factions within their movement to stage a coup. Either way, they would lose control of the country. But while they might escape from the American onslaught with their lives, and perhaps even with a chance at returning to power if the occupation went badly, a coup would lead directly to their deaths.

Large-scale rationality, with economic interests and geopolitical power structures and so on, that’s very important in keeping a war going and setting the range of possible postwar environments. But the events that lead up to war take place at a different level, where there’s a lot of contingency and a lot of personality. That must have been quite obvious in ancient times, when a policymaker in Asia Minor had no way of getting information in real time about military alliances that are or are not being formed in mainland Greece, but plenty of information about who’s dominant in the face to face relationships he has with the people around him.

I teach Latin and Greek at a mid-ranking college in the interior of the USA. When the story of Helen and Paris comes up in my classes, I ask my students to imagine what might happen if Michelle Obama fell in love with Ji Xinping’s son and the two of them ran off together. It would be a tremendous challenge to diplomacy to prevent even that situation from ending in disastrous violence. How much more volatile would the situation be if, instead of a bilateral confrontation between nuclear-armed superpowers who are connected by an incalculable number of electronic communications on a daily basis, the parties were loose and shifting coalitions with no access to even the most basic information about each other’s positions and capabilities.

by acilius on December 29, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient World, Violence
Tagged , , ,

Posted by acilius on December 29, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/12/29/war-for-helen/

Whom we mourn

May Ethan Schmidt and Amy Prentiss, who were shot to death yesterday in Cleveland, Mississippi, rest in peace, and may those who love them commemorate their lives by living as fully as possible.

Ethan Schmidt, a professor at Delta State University, was killed in his office; Amy Prentiss was killed at home.  As a “school shooting,” Ethan Schmidt’s death dominated US cable news for several hours, and led to massive law enforcement activity on and around the campus of Delta State.

That coverage and law enforcement activity led me to think about social class. What if Ethan Schmidt had been killed at his workplace, not as the professor he was, but as the liquor store clerk he might have been?  Would MSNBC, CNN, and Fox have given the event saturation coverage?  Would dozens of square miles have been subjected to a virtual state of martial law, with multiple local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies on site, until progress was made in the case?  Or would the whole thing have been unlikely to make the front page even of the local paper in Cleveland more than twice, and would the one police officer assigned to investigate the case have faced a challenge trying to get the resources necessary to conduct a proper investigation?

I think of a friend of mine who for some time had two part-time jobs.  He taught a couple of French classes in the same university where I teach. He also worked as the night clerk at a liquor store. Had he been (God forbid!) shot in his office at the university, no doubt it would have provoked the same massive response from the media and law enforcement that followed the death of Ethan Schmidt.  Had he been (God forbid!) shot at the counter in the liquor store, perhaps there would eventually have been some kind of news story about his distinguished record as a teacher on several continents, but for him in his capacity as a liquor store clerk, surely there would have been the same underwhelming response that usually greets crimes against people in that line of work.

May all liquor store clerks killed at work rest in peace, and may those those who love them commemorate their lives by living as fully as possible.

by acilius on September 15, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, Violence
Tagged

Posted by acilius on September 15, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/09/15/whom-we-mourn/

An impossible balance?

Yesterday, I posted this on tumblr:

https://www.tumblr.com/themightyacilius/121957035931/these-are-the-9-black-lives-lost-in-the-charleston

I don’t exactly agree with what I said there, that we must not remember the twerp or his cause.  It’s really more that we have to strike a balance, and that balance is nearly impossible to achieve.

On the one hand, terrorists kill because they want to become famous and to gain publicity for their cause.  Therefore we should ignore them.  On the other hand, terrorists kill because they want to blind us to the humanity of their victims and to isolate the group of people to which the victims were targeted for belonging.  Therefore we ought to raise our voices and cry out about the violence, to remember what was done, why it was done, and face the facts which make it likely to be repeated.

So, we have to simultaneously ignore El Twerpo and examine him deeply, simultaneously dismiss his loathsome beliefs and search for their roots in our social order and their echoes in our own minds, simultaneously equate him with all that is weak and contemptible and recognize the bleak power that broods behind him.  How can we strike this balance?  The hell if I know.  But I am sure it must be done.

by acilius on June 20, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, Thunderlads at Large, Violence
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on June 20, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/06/20/an-impossible-balance/

What’s happening in northern Nigeria?

The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office put out this map of Nigeria a couple of weeks ago

What’s happening in northern Nigeria? Eric Draitser, founder of the website Stop Imperialism, seems to have an answer, and he shares it with readers of Counterpunch in this, the first of a series of articles he promises to contribute there.

Mr Draitser lists three major factors that have made the rise of Boko Haram possible:

First, there is Nigeria’s domestic politics, and the issue of Boko Haram and the perception of the government and opposition’s responsibility for the chaos it has wreaked.  With elections scheduled to take place in February, Boko Haram and national security have, quite understandably, become dominant issues in the public mind.  The mutual finger-pointing and accusations provide an important backdrop for understanding how Boko Haram fits both into the public discourse, and into the strategies of political networks behind the scenes in Nigeria, and the region more broadly.

Second is the all-important regional political and economic chessboard. In West Africa – an area rich in strategic resources – there are a few interested parties who stand to gain from Boko Haram’s ongoing attacks which amount to a destabilization of the entire Nigerian state.  Nigeria’s neighbor Chad has recently come under heavy scrutiny from Nigeria’s military apparatus for its purported role in financing and facilitating Boko Haram’s expansion. Chad sees in Nigeria potential oil profits as it expands its own oil extraction capabilities throughout the Chad Basin – a geographical region that includes significant territory in Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger.  Of course, major oil companies, not to mention powerful western nations such as France, have a vested interest in maintaining their profits from West African oil. 

Finally and, perhaps most importantly, is the continental and global perspective.  Nigeria, as Africa’s most dynamic economy, presents major opportunities and challenges for key global powers.  For China, Nigeria represents one of its principal investment footholds in Africa. A key trading partner for Beijing, Nigeria has increasingly been moving out of the direct orbit of the West, transforming it from a reliable, if subservient, Western ally, into an obstacle to be overcome.  Coinciding with these developments has been the continually expanding US military presence throughout Africa, one that is increasingly concentrated in West Africa, though without much media fanfare aside from the Ebola story.

Mr Draitser goes on to explain how the destruction of the Gadhafi regime in Libya destabilized the whole region to the north and east of Nigeria, transforming Chad from a subordinate player in North African politics into a revisionist power.

Compare with the FCO map above

Mr Draitser’s piece is the single most illuminating thing I have found about the situation in Nigeria, and I am very glad to have seen it.  I do feel constrained to quote from something I read the same day, a blog post in which Rod Dreher, referring to discussions of conflicts in the Muslim world, including northern Nigeria, complains that “most people on the secular Left simply do not understand how religion works.”  That isn’t to say that we have to take the actors in these conflicts at their word when they claim that their motives are entirely religious, and certainly the conflict in Nigeria would not be possible without the economic and geopolitical facts on which Mr Draitser focuses.  What I suspect is simply this, that it is a mistake to leave religion out altogether when we are analyzing a situation like this.

Be that as it may, I very much look forward to Mr Draitser’s next installment.  He refers to a forthcoming “Part Two”; I hope there will also be a Part Three, Part Four, and as many other parts as he can manage.

by acilius on January 28, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Counterpunch, Wars and Rumors of Wars
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on January 28, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/01/28/whats-happening-in-northern-nigeria/

Martin Luther King Day, 2015

Last week, National Public Radio reported on a study by Indiana University professor Sara Konrath and others.  Professor Konrath and her co-authors showed that, while Americans of all races think warmer thoughts about African Americans in general on Martin Luther King Day than they do the rest of the year, their opinion of General Colin Powell and President Barack Obama goes down on that day.  Professor Konrath’s theory is that this is because Mr Powell and Mr O are prominent male African American leaders, and Dr King was a prominent male African American leader, so we compare them to him on that day.  Since Dr King is presented on his birthday as a saint of America’s civic religion, that sets an impossible standard for any living person to meet, and they look bad by contrast.

I am sure there is much truth in Professor Konrath’s theory.  At the same time, I would point out that Messrs. Powell and Obama are particularly ill-chosen as comparisons with Dr King.  Dr King was a thoroughgoing pacifist, while Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 war against Iraq and Secretary of State during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And Barack Obama is one of the most warlike US presidents ever, responsible for ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, for injecting the US into wars in Libya and Syria, and for sponsoring a coup in Honduras that constituted an act of aggressive war against that country, among many other acts of extreme violence.  If people actually listen to Dr King’s message on the day America sets aside to remember him, one would expect their opinion of warlords like Mr Powell and Mr O to be very low indeed.

In honor of this MLK Day, I’d like to post this statement of Dr King’s on the power of nonviolence:

by acilius on January 19, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Special Days, Violence
Tagged , , ,

Posted by acilius on January 19, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/01/19/martin-luther-king-day-2015/

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