Obsidian Wings

The Spiritual Crisis of Zionism

by Doctor Science

Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism came out in the spring, but I only recently got a chance to read it -- supposedly it wasn’t all that popular, but it still took a while to work its way down to me on the public library waiting list.

The Crisis of Zionism may not have gotten much in the way of sales, but it sure generated a lot of heat. Andrew Sullivan did a pretty thorough job of tracking reviews and commentary about the book -- most of which was negative, to Sully's great disappointment.

My take: Beinart is talking about a real, critically important issue for Israel, Zionism, and the worldwide Jewish community:

In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself.

I think the book's greatest weakness is that Beinart mostly talks about the issue as a political problem, to be solved by political means. He doesn't spend enough time thinking about this as a religious or spiritual issue: the non-Orthodox majority of American Jews are finding Zionism-as-she-is-practiced less and less compatible with our beliefs about what we, as Jews, are called to do. American Jews are not becoming more secular, we are becoming more religious -- but in a different way than Israeli Jews.

I had intended to write and put up this post at the beginning of the Days of Awe, for seasonally-appropriate discussion, but it grew to be over 4000(!!) words long. By that point there wasn't time to have an actual discussion before I would have had to close the comments for Yom Kippur. So I'm posting it now, for an early start on *next* year's Days of Awe.

Be warned that I will be policing the comments with extra firmness -- I'm aware that this topic is one of the third rails of the Internet, with Godwin pre-installed. Historical comparisons had better be supported by historical evidence, not just by your feelings.

Carved shofar from 17th-18th century PolandNational Music Museum in Vermillion, SD. The carvings are Kabalistic, and draw numerological connections between the shofar's sounds and the story of the Binding of Isaac, the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah.

Four different shofar calls are sounded on Rosh Hashanah; you can hear them in this YouTube video. The Yom Kippur service ends with the long blast, Tekiah Gadolah, prefiguring the Last Trump of Judgment Day. If your shofar-blower is bald or nearly so, you'll see a wave of red (or even purple!) wash over his whole scalp for the last seconds of the call.

Your meeting the troll Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

He drove me off Twitter, hacked my Facebook, and abused and terrified my family. Yet the biggest shock of all was meeting him

A fascinating Guardian article, originally from this site (though the white font on a black background is a bit tough to read) about one person's very surprising experience with a troll. 

Lincoln's Laws of War and Our Own

by Doctor Science

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. John Fabian Witt writes that:

Emancipation touched off a crisis for the principle of humanitarian limits in wartime and transformed the international laws of war. In the crucible of emancipation, Lincoln created the rules that now govern soldiers around the world.
....
In December 1862, three weeks before the final emancipation order was to go into effect, and just as criticism of emancipation was reaching its height, Lincoln’s general in chief, Henry W. Halleck, commissioned a pamphlet-length statement of the Union’s view of the laws of war.

Drafted by the Columbia professor Francis Lieber and approved by Lincoln himself, the code set out a host of humane rules: it prohibited torture, protected prisoners of war and outlawed assassinations. It distinguished between soldiers and civilians and it disclaimed cruelty, revenge attacks and senseless suffering.

[links added.]

Prisoners from the Front by Winslow Homer. "It represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (1834–1896), captured several Confederate officers on June 21, 1864. The background depicts the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia."

A few weeks ago, fan/pro writer Sam Starbuck said:

I've been watching a documentary this morning called The Man Nobody Knew, made about Bill Colby, who was heavily involved in the Vietnam War and was director of the CIA in the seventies. I'm watching the footage currently of his examination before a Congressional committee into the misdeeds of the CIA, and it strikes me as downright surreal, the level of indignation being expressed over CIA covert actions. It's not that I think we shouldn't be indignant, shouldn't be angry, that the CIA assassinated or planned to assassinate major international political figures; it's more that I can't believe anyone actually was. I can't remember a time when it wasn't pretty much common knowledge that our intelligence agencies did this kind of thing. These men all seem so surprised.

It used to strike me as odd, when I was watching Torchwood, that I'd made such a complete transition from rooting for Mulder and Scully to uncover secrets to rooting for Jack Harkness to conceal them. That's a pretty big leap to make, that's changing sides, but I think it illustrates the mindset of kids who came of age in my generation. We grew up in the remnants of the Cold War and the beginnings of the war(s) in Iraq; I was twenty-one the year the Twin Towers fell. I have never had the luxury of trusting my government, but I've never managed to stir up much genuine rage over it either. It's simply the way the world is. (Which is terrible, I acknowledge, but I'm trying to be truthful, not perfect.)

[links added] I remember the Church Committee hearing, and can assure Sam that people were in fact *surprised*, as well as appalled, that the US government was authorizing assassinations. Most civilians, at least, assumed that the US was and ought to be adhering to Lincoln's code. Yes, we knew realistically that there might be "incidents" of torture, assassination, or prisoner abuse, but they would be due to "rogue agents" or "bad apples", not to government policy.

Since 9/11, I've watched a *lot* of America change sides, as Sam did. I don't know if it really started with 9/11, or if it was already happening and I just didn't notice. I also have no idea if people in the military or defense establishment had the same experience, when it happened, and whether they deliberately jettisoned Lincoln's code or if they just kind of forgot about it.

I also don't have a good sense, off the top of my head, of where popular culture fits into this. 24 began in 2001, and it's definitely post-Lincoln in its morality. The first season was produced before the 9/11 attacks: was it as pro-torture then as it was in later seasons? At the other end, I don't recall that the original Mission: Impossible ever crossed the "no torture, no assassinations" line, though it sure crept right up to it. What about the MI movies? I've never seen it (I don't watch movies that are R-rated for violence, which means Quentin Tarantino's œuvre is a closed book to me), but my understand is that Inglorious Basterds is a parody? satire? exploration? exploitation? all of the above? of the desire to kick the code of war to the curb -- though I don't know if that developed over the very long course of its writing and development.

Prisoner of War by Peter Straub. An original oil painting produced for an article about censorship in America.

Your interesting combinations Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

While one shouldn't be surprised by a regular column from Slate that is titled 'You're doing it wrong', this one does hit the spot with a recommendation of watermelon and feta cheese:

If you were trying to design the ideal ingredient to complement watermelon, you’d probably come up with something very similar to feta cheese: creamy and dense where watermelon is watery and crunchy—and also salty enough to stand up to the fruit’s intense sugariness. The combination of feta and watermelon needs literally nothing else: no salt, no pepper, no salad dressing.

So a thread for those strange combinations that work. Have at it.

GON 2 RIVENDELL BRB

by Doctor Science

Yesterday I happened to walk a mile almost first thing in the morning, and it felt so good I want to make a habit of it again. Since the family is doing a read-aloud of The Lord of the Rings (we just finished "A Knife in the Dark"), my thoughts naturally went to the Eowyn Challenge. What the heck, I said, I'll walk to Rivendell!.

It turns out that my part of NJ has added a *lot* of public open space and trails in the last 10 years. Today I did a bit over 2 miles, of a trail I haven't walked before. Very lovely, open fields and wood edges, with a view up the valley that includes almost no houses or roads -- which is a notable achievement in central NJ. Next time, though, I'm wearing my hiking boots: the trail is really just a little path, and it's kind of uneven for my uneven ankles.

The boots, btw, are unlined Gore-Tex hiking boots that are my personal instance of the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Economic Injustice. I got them for $99 about 25 years ago -- the equivalent of over $200 in today's money, and the most in constant dollars that I've ever spent on footwear. I could only afford them because my grandmother gave me the money as a gift. And you know what? My feet are still dry.

I haven't been able to find just the right landscape picture to go with this post, so I shall quit wasting time looking for one and give you a good ol' Constable. Now I can get back to wasting time on today's xkcd.

Constable, Fen Lane, East Bergholt. A little too flat and wet to be the true Shire, methinks, but still picturesque as all getout. Sarehole, where Tolkien grew up, has indeed been completely suburbanized, far more than my part of NJ.

The video life of Mitt 'Doofenshimirtz' Romney

by liberal japonicus

This title is inspired by this lede from the Guardian,

Mitt Romney's campaign came close to hitting the self-destruct button when he stood by a secret video recording suggesting that 47% of Americans are government-dependent "victims" who do not pay taxes.

I don't know if anyone is a fan of Phineas and Ferb, but the second story concerns the evil schemes of Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who creates some machine to rule the Tri-State area and always designs a self-destruct button into his evil creations. 

But Cartoon Network references aside, while everyone seems to have concentrated on the 'victims' crack from the first set of videos, the other video (here) from a 2nd article are, to my mind, even more jaw-dropping.

Romney is certain that there is no way to resolve the Israel and Palestine situation

One is the one which I've had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.

Romney talks about a former Sec of State who said

On the other hand, I got a call from a former secretary of state. I won't mention which one it was, but this individual said to me, you know, I think there's a prospect for a settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis after the Palestinian elections. I said, "Really?" And, you know, his answer was, "Yes, I think there's some prospect." And I didn't delve into it.

One trope that was floated after the Egypt and Libya embassy attacks was that Obama was blowing off security briefings. Yet here is Romney, being told by presumably a Republican former Sec of State about differences between his world view and what may actually be out there, and he can't even take it on board.

If you haven't listened to the other videos, do. 

Obama and energy independence

by liberal japonicus

I fell for the double threadjack and messed up the last thread, but since Obama's approach to energy independence seems to be of interest, I wanted to pass on this article on.

In preparing to write The New New Deal, Grunwald did extensive research on the Department of Energy's Stimulus-funded quest to uncover an energy alternative to fossil fuels. Recently, I talked to Grunwald about his new book and the "silent green revolution" that is currently underway at the Department of Energy. 

The New New Deal is a narrative about President Obama and his $800 billion stimulus bill, but it also has an argument. Can you quickly lay out the argument, and specifically how it relates to research and clean energy?

Grunwald: Sure. The argument is that everything you think you know about the stimulus is wrong. It was not a pathetic failure. It helped prevent a second depression and end a brutal recession in the short term; it was a huge down payment on Obama's campaign promises to transform the U.S. economy for the long term. But clean energy was the real outlier, getting $90 billion when the U.S. had been spending just a few billion a year. There were unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every imaginable form; a smarter grid; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; electric vehicles; the factories to build all that green stuff in the U.S., and yes, clean energy research.

The url title of this article is amid-partisan-bickering-everyone-agrees-arpa-e-is-a-fascinating-experiment, so I trust that one of our happy band will work hard to prove that is wrong.

Dinesh D'Souza and Gondorian Exceptionalism

by Doctor Science

2016: Obama's America is a documentary[1] by Dinesh D'Souza, based on his books "The Roots of Obama's Rage" and "Obama's America". So far it's doing extremely well at the box office. The premise of books and movie, according to Wikipedia, is

that Barack Obama's attitude toward America derives from his father's anti-colonialism and from a psychological desire to fulfill his father's dream of diminishing the power of Western imperial states.

I have no intention of giving D'Souza money, so I haven't seen it, but most critics say it's pretty awful.

Dinesh D'Souza, bravely questing for the Truth About Obama. source.

Found things Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

In line with the possible discovery of Richard III's remains and woolly mammoth DNA and a lost Renoir in a WVirginia flea market, I wonder what the commentariat would like to be discovered. Obviously, finding something in the same fashion as the $7 Renoir, that would allow me to live in the style I should be accustomed to, would be great, but let's make it a bit difficult and say you can't profit from it. Go for it.

And gladly teach

by Doctor Science

Sprog the Younger is beginning her junior year of high school, so we have to start thinking about "where do you want to go to college?" Which involves also thinking in a vague way about "what do you want to do for a career?"

What StY likes best (at the moment, subject to change) is explaining history to people. What that sounds like is "high school history teacher", which *should* be a good, respectable job for which there is a solid demand, and which she really thinks she'd *like*. She likes people younger than her, she likes the idea of not sitting on her butt staring at a computer all day long, she loves explaining things and watching kids *get* it, she loves the fact that there's always more history to learn, and she doesn't mind that the potential salary doesn't go up indefinitely, but tops off around $100K.

But how can I encourage her in this direction, when powerful people seem to feel that making a job worse is a brilliant strategy for attracting the best talent? History teacher is particularly thankless, because, as someone I can't track down said, "I don't know where you went to high school, but I know the name of one of your history teachers: Coach." She doesn't *want* to coach, except maybe Marching Band Color Guard, she wants to teach history! Because it's about How the World Works!

I know Americans tell pollsters they have great respect for teachers, but that's not how we've ever *acted*, as a society. If you look at Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, for instance, you'll see that the discipline problems and disrespect were much worse than today, on a per student-day basis. I don't see it likely that we'll get an educational system with the success or respect of Finland's anytime soon -- that is, in the next several decades or more.

Not least because

1. so many problems are blamed on "Bad Teachers"
2. but do you think the Bad History Teachers who are Winning Football Coaches will get fired? yeah, right.

So, what should we tell StY? What other careers besides teaching might fit her skill/interest set? While you're at it, nominate colleges she might want to visit:

1. in the Northeast or northern Midwest, not including NJ
2. not in NYC
3. with good History and teacher prep programs, but other liberal arts & sciences too
4. with a Marching Band & Color Guard, but easy-going -- so probably not a winning Div I football team.
5. (for extra credit) a good value for money, so less likely to result in a large burden of loans

The Young Schoolmistress, by Chardin. image source.