Month: October 2014

Paglia Weighs In On Campus Sex Crimes

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I like Camille Paglia a lot in no small part because the world clearly has no idea what to do with her. I mean, just look at the intro she gets to this piece for Time: Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. I mean, that’s true, she did write that book, but it has nothing to do with who she is, what she thinks, or why so many people find her fascinating (or infuriating). Anyway, here’s her take on sex crimes on collage campuses: “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

She calls the warning cries about levels of sexual violence on college campuses “wildly overblown” and–in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom from all the experts–declares that it really is forcible rape by strangers that should be every woman’s concern. She writes:

Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

I’d be inclined to write her off as being a bit over-confident in her own anecdotal experiences over hard facts if it were for the fact that I also recently read an NRO piece on the same topic: The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction:

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

So the numbers are really in dispute after all, and Paglia may have some legitimate backup. Setting that contention aside for a moment, however, I think there’s no real arguing with these paragraphs from her piece:

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

And that dark vision of human nature and the reality we inhabit really explains Paglia’s appeal to conservatives despite her radical left-wing politics. I can’t resist quoting just a bit more:

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

You should just read the whole post. It is, like so much of what she writes, well worth the time.

Medieval Knights: Surprisingly Agile

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2014-10-14 Knights

Gizmodo points out this excellent YouTube video showcasing the surprisingly agility of knights in full plate armor.[ref]Email subscribers will have to click to view the article because videos don’t embed in the emails.[/ref]

Running, climbing ladders, getting up unassisted, jumping jacks, rolling on the floor: the armor is definitely restrictive versus wearing none at all, but the range of mobility is really surprising given what I’d expect. Also, as a bonus, there are some reconstructions of sword fighting techniques at the end of the video based on ancient manuscripts. Very cool video.

The Peshmerga Vs. ISIS: A Military Appraisal

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This is a fascinating article by Kenneth Pollack on what likely occurred when ISIS attacked the Kurds this summer, and is well worth a read.

The long and short of it is that the Peshmerga is still a good force, but it is not quite what it used to be.

For one, the manpower has changed. Between the 60s and 80s, most of the Peshmerga recruits grew up in the harsh, rugged environment of the mountains. Being able to handle a rifle was necessary for survival (wolves still preyed on flocks and the various tribes settled scores with each other and with the government) so it is no surprise that the Kurds were “uncanny marksmen” in the words of an Israeli military advisor who trained them in the 60s. In recent years, Kurdish society has become increasingly urban. The recruits are “not terribly different from young city-dwellers across the world… more likely to have played “Call of Duty” than to have hunted or fired an actual weapon in anger.”

Second, the Peshmerga hasn’t seen significant action since 1996, and that was a civil war amongst similarly-armed Kurdish factions.

Third, they have rested on their laurels a bit, and have let training and discipline slip. “In that respect, they were probably unprepared to take on the highly-motivated ISIS troops they were suddenly forced to fight.”

Fourth, they suffer from a deficiency of heavy weapons like artillery and armoured vehicles, and what they have got is very dated, being at least 30-40 years old, if not older.

ISIS took the Kurds by surprise, but they fought back, managing to negate some of ISIS’s advantages. Still, as Pollack notes, “ISIS’s modus operandi is that when it is thwarted on one axis of advance, it simply turns and attacks in another direction,” and the article helps explain what is going on right now

ISIS has advanced to the Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria, triggering a massive flight of Kurds. The situation in Kobane is desperate, and despite its valiant efforts, the YPG, the Kurdish militia, suffers from many of the same disadvantages that gave ISIS its initial victories against the Peshmerga. The YPG is less than ten years old (and has been fighting for only three), is formed of Urban youths, and has no heavy weaponry at all. ISIS, on the other hand, has deployed its newly acquired tanks. The Kurds of the YPG are literally fighting with their backs to the wall, but due to these weaknesses they cannot hold out against ISIS if they receive no outside help on the ground.

October 12th, 1940: The Warsaw Ghetto

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Today marks the 74th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw had been home to vibrant Jewish culture, religious and secular. Before the war’s outbreak, 30 percent of the population was Jewish. The ghetto was set up in order to better control and contain the Jewish population before deporting it to death camps.

I have a personal interest in the Warsaw Ghetto. As far as we know, all of my Dad’s side of the family that remained in Europe perished in the Holocaust. That, however, was much further south, in Bukovina. My interest in the Warsaw Ghetto comes from a couple of different things. As a child, I had some wooden trains made by a survivour of the ghetto who lived on a kibbutz where my Mom had volunteered in the 70s. Then, in high school, I participated in a program where a mixed group of Jewish and Arab youth engaged in dialogue about current politics, while learning about the Holocaust in a museum that emphasized two aspects- children’s life, and armed resistance. At the end of it, we were certified as guides in the museum. Due to transport issues I was never able to fully take advantage of the opportunity, but the interest in the Warsaw Ghetto has remained with me.

Here are the stories of three individuals from the Warsaw Ghetto. All three were killed, but each one tells us something a little different about what the Nazis tried to, but could never destroy.

Janusz Korczak.

Janusz Korchak was a pioneering pedagogue, children’s author, and orphanage director. Because of his professional fame, Korczak had the chance to save himself, but refused to abandon the children of his orphanage.

Mordechai Anielewicz.

Mordechai Anielewicz formed an armed resistance group in the ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came as a nasty shock to the Germans, convinced as they were that the Jews were broken and defeated. The liquidation of the ghetto that should have taken three days, took instead a month, and the uprising inspired further resistance.

Hillel Zeitlin.

Hillel Zeitlin was born into a religious Jewish family, but abandoned religion in his youth before undergoing powerful spiritual and mystical experiences that caused him to regain his faith. He died at age 71 proudly wearing in a prayer shawl, and carrying a volume of the Zohar, the preeminent work of Jewish mysticism.

Grim Sunday reading, I know, yet these three things are beautiful beyond words. To love others when you must pay the ultimate price for it, to refuse to remain passive while people being murdered or wronged, and to devote oneself to God even in the depths of despair, that is kind of what Sunday is all about.

TED: Economist on the Global Impact of Remittances

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Economist Dilip Ratha gave a fascinating TED talk this month on the global impact of money sent by migrants to their native countries. It is hard to imagine how this subject gets overlooked when Ratha points out that the amount of money sent home by migrants in 2013 was three times that of development aid. Or that remittances make up 42% of Tajikistan’s GDP. Or that monthly remittances to Somalia exceed the average per capita income of $250 per year. What especially struck me was the following line by Ratha in his discussion of Somalia:

“Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations.”

Sometimes the most conventional method of helping the poor isn’t the most effective.

Abortion, Race, and Cluelessness

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2014-10-10 Abortion and Race

In September, The Atlantic ran a post called Abortion’s Racial Gap that was breathtaking in its cluelessness.

The rate of abortion among American women is currently at its lowest point since Roe v. Wade, according to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute. About 1.1 million abortions were performed in 2011, at a rate of 16.9 abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, down from a peak of 29.3 per 1,000 in 1981. Since the report’s release in February, the reason why has been the subject of much debate. Its authors and abortion-rights supporters point to the increase in contraceptive use and sexual education, while anti-abortion activists counter that the decrease is a result of abstinence-only teachings and state restrictions.

Largely missing from the debate, though, is discussion of abortion’s racial disparity: Although rates among Hispanic and African-American women have decreased along with the rest of the country, they remain significantly higher than the national average.

To the extent that abortion’s racial disparity is “largely missing from the debate,” it is absolutely not because pro-lifers are either ignorant of it or silent on the topic. The problem, by contrast, is that the overwhelmingly pro-choice media squelches any discussion of, for example, the insidious beliefs that prompted pro-choice hero Margaret Sanger to advocate for legalized abortion. I’ll go ahead and give away the secret: she was an ardent eugenecist who hoped that abortion and birth control could be used to exterminated blacks from the country. Ask any pro-lifer about this, and they’ll happily tell you about it and find one of her more infamous quotes and point out that, tragically, her legacy seems to be alive and well. Meanwhile Planned Parenthood, the organization she founded, still gives an annual award in her name. Oh there’s a racial disparity alright, but it’s only on one side of this issue.

To their credit, I think that pro-choicers (who are usually liberal) aren’t intentionally trying to conceal the concern that pro-lifer’s have on this issue. I think they just genuinely can’t imagine that conservatives (who are supposed to be racist) might actually sincerely care about the racial impact of abortion policy in the United States.

By chance, I happened upon another article that demonstrates exactly how this plays out in real time. Over at Townhall, Ryan Bomberger described the reaction to some comments from Jessa Duggar after visiting the Holocaust Museum. She wrote:

I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today… very sobering. Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights–their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed “less than human.” Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are “more evolved” and others “less evolved.” A denying that our Creator–GOD–made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are “not fit to live.” So they’re murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor… May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife

No matter what you think about this message, one thing is clears: she understands the connection between discrimination and being ProLife. The backlash was as vicious as it was predictable:

Cosmo went into full anti-woman mode. Filipovic attacked Jessa Duggar for daring to put history into perspective: “Jessa had just walked out of the Holocaust museum, and instead of absorbing the scale of that atrocity, decided to make a point about abortion rights. That’s not just tone-deaf; it’s deranged.”

So, just to be clear, pro-lifers are acutely aware of the connection between race and abortion. Folks–especially those in the media–just tend to have an allergic reaction every time we bring it up. Then, when they discover the connection themselves, they act as though it’s the most starting, unexpected thing in the world.

Maybe they should have been listening.

Banksy and the Temple

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2014-10-09 Banksy on the TempleCarl had a really beautiful insight over on his blog I Feel Like Schrödinger’s Cat that linked Banksy[ref]He’s a famous graffiti artist. See Wikipedia for more.[/ref] with Mormon temple in a way that’s as profound as it is surprising. Based on the image / quote from Banksy (at left), he wrote:

When your name is said for the last time, that means the memory of you is now dead and gone forever. And that will happen to all of us. However, having worked in the temple for about a month now… I had another thought. As I sat there helping out and participating in all of these rituals for our honored dead, it occurred to me that, for each person who has lived on the planet, we say their names multiple times in the temple as they go from baptism, to confirmation, to initiatory, to endowment, and then to sealings.

Very likely, for most of the humans on the planet, the last time their name will be said out loud will be in an LDS temple.

Carl points out that there’s a beauty to that, and he’s right. I think it’s even a beauty that can be admired by those who don’t believe Mormonism is true.

So maybe in some sense the line from Banksy is true, that you die again when your name is said for the last time. But if your name is said for the last time in a Mormon temple, it’s a deliberate attempt to make sure that your name, and your life, and those relationships most important to you, will be remembered and continued in heaven forever. It’s our way of making this “second death” deliberate and meaningful.

I think this might actually be one of the best and most accessible explanations for Mormon posthumous work that I’ve ever read.

The Atlantic on “The Illusion of the Natural”

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“What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.”

So says an article in The Atlantic titled “The Illusion of ‘Natural’.” It begins with the following:

It is difficult to read any historical account of smallpox without encountering the word filth. In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor…Filth theory was eventually replaced by germ theory, a superior understanding of the nature of contagion, but filth theory was not entirely wrong or useless. Raw sewage running in the streets can certainly spread diseases, although smallpox is not one of them, and the sanitation reforms inspired by filth theory dramatically reduced the incidence of cholera, typhus, and plague.

The author draws a parallel between the 19th-century fear of filth with today’s fear of toxins:

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified—like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers—but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this means a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century. A passion for bodily purity drove the eugenics movement that led to the sterilization of women who were blind, black, or poor. Concerns for bodily purity were behind miscegenation laws that persisted for more than a century after the abolition of slavery, and behind sodomy laws that were only recently declared unconstitutional. Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.

This kind of thinking pervades anti-vaccine movements and alternative medicine.[ref]Also food puritans and some environmentalists.[/ref] I’m always taken back by the view of technology or medicine as somehow “unclean” and the nostalgic pining for the “natural” world. Because when people were left with all things “natural” in the past, their lives were cut short:

Those Darn Medical Missionaries

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Dr. Kent, the Christian medical missionary who survived contracting Ebola. Also, apparently, a more alarming concern than Ebola itself.
Dr. Kent, the Christian medical missionary who survived contracting Ebola. Also, apparently, a more alarming concern than Ebola itself. (At least if you’re a certain kind of intellectual who might write for Slate.)

I’ll give Brian Palmer this: in his article for Slate he’s not at all shy about telling us how he really feels. It’s great, he says, that Christian medical missionaries are out there trying to do good works in Africa: “Rather than parachuting in during crises, like some international medicine specialists, a large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.” And yet, after all the kind words like these he has to say for medical missionaries, they only serve to underscore the weirdness of his central point:

When an infected American missionary was flown back to the United States for treatment…  a fair number of Americans were thinking a much milder, less offensive form [thinking that he should “suffer the consequences” or that he was “idiotic”]. I’ll hold my own hand up. I still don’t feel good about missionary medicine, even though I can’t fully articulate why.

So let me point out the first obvious irony, which is for someone flying the proud flag of rationalism and skepticism to be so open and honest about his totally irrational and credulous animosity towards Christians. Gee, if only we had a word to describe irrational, unarticulated prejudices…The sad part is that religious skepticism has descended so far below the heights of freethinking iconoclasm that no one even seems to remember when rejecting theism was a carefully considered intellectual proposition that actually meant something. Now it’s a fashion statement. Some of us don’t like normcore. Some of don’t like Christianity. People are weird, am I right?

I’m definitely not the first to take Palmer to task, and I’m avoiding the most obvious problem with his argument. David French handled that admirably in his piece for the NRO:

In other words, [Palmer] has a problem with medical missionaries because they’re not operating in first-world hospitals with first-world reporting systems and first-world systems of legal accountability? If there weren’t staffing shortages, drug shortages, a lack of large health-care facilities, and all the other issues that dominate developing-world medicine, we wouldn’t need medical missionaries.

French is right, and so I don’t repeat it. Instead, let me raise just one other issue. It’s subtle, I think, until you state it out loud. Then it seems really, really awkwardly obvious. We’re on the threshold of an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Africa with the potential to kill millions (both directly and from the resulting chaos and upheaval) and, on the verge of this nightmare, Palmer thinks it’s a good time to talk about the queasiness with which he regards the religiosity of strangers? That is what the threat of a continent-wide pandemic makes him think is a really pressing issue?

Now that’s some privilege right there.