*
ICARUS
Below me, the water’s
muddy gray waves
but no dolphins, no
sea sharks, no mother
no father, they
are elsewhere
beyond the mountains
in the deserts
west of Phoenix
and I am here
in these clouds
bound to these wings
with plastic ropes
and butcher’s string,
In the evening desert
they sit at the table
my father reading
the bible, the story
of Peter hiding
in the shadows
my mother playing
with her photographs:
a mouth forced open
by death, a wedding
she no longer remembers,
a lost boy with a round ball
and parachute pants
the sun is hot and close
a door into tomorrow
~ John Guzlowski
*
RUSSIA’S REAL RELIGION
~ Russians are a religious people. They are no cynics!
Russians’ true religion is not Orthodox Christianity, which has been for too long an extension of the reactionary state to inspire a sense of wonder. Their secular religion is to dwell on mythological past concocted in the Kremlin-sponsored think tanks who have recycled Soviet playbook and broadcast on state-controlled television round the clock and drummed into children’s heads at state schools.
Russia is the greatest country.
Russians are the greatest people superior to the rest.
Russian Army are always victorious and can beat and destroy America (never mind that economically and militarily America is at least two generations ahead).
All those tenets are matters of faith, therefore no amount of arguments and facts can change people’s hearts and minds. Except to start showing a different message on TV.
On the surface, Putin is a typical Soviet loser.
A man small in stature due to malnutrition, with an array of complexes. A domestic tyrant who compensates for his failures and humiliations he’s been subjected to, who was beaten by his dad as a child, and wants to lash out in revenge on the world. Tens of millions of Russians discovered that they’re just like him. And those who weren’t and chose to be vocal about it, found themselves in deep water.
If you dig deeper, you realize that almost the entire nation has fallen hard under his spell like Pied Piper and his rats seduced by Putin’s cloying words.
It’s like the whole nation have become somnambulists who surrendered to the sweetness of make belief worlds he has drawn in their minds with his long speeches. And they want to fight it but they can’t — the drug has taken hold of them.
If for World War One, volunteers were requested to defend their brothers and sisters in Orthodox Christian faith in Serbia, for World War Three, Russians have been asked to go kill their brothers and sisters in order to “liberate” them from an alien religion they have become possessed with.
What do Russian soldiers really die and get wounded for?
For the indefinite extension of sanctions, for the poverty of their families, for more misery, hatred of the civilized world, hatred of Ukrainians, then eventually Civil War, and disintegration of their state.
This doesn’t sell well, not due to ingrained stupidity of the enterprise but because of the weakness of spirit and the smallness of hearts. Putin succeeded in creating millions of cowards by getting rid of every potential leader who could have inspired Russians to grow a pair and open up their hearts.
An abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union caught everyone by surprise in the West, and there was no preparation or thought-through roadmap of what to do with the largest socialist republic inhabited with the entitled titular nation of the former empire.
Eventually, Russian Federation became a US-vetted neo-con project — an oligarchy masquerading as democracy whose sole reason for existence as a state was to sell natural resources to the West and keep their hands off the nukes.
Putin broke that deal with the West after his repeated threats of nuclear strikes, through invasion of Ukraine, and by turning the gas taps off and leaving Europe without gas before winter.
The new deal for Russia will probably mean dismantling of the federation and forming another political entity or a number of entities.
One thing is certain though — after watching how the populace have fallen under the spell of a dictator with inferiority complex who has systematically bribed European politicians to keep them complacent of his reign, the West will think twice to leave Russia stewing in its own juices once again. ~ Misha Firer
Oriana:
I have been searching for an answer about Putin’s motives in invading Ukraine — for which he has neither the manpower (currently, convicts are being offered freedom and money if they join the army) nor the kind of economy that could sustain prolonged war and occupation. I’ve discovered two motives that make some sense to me.
First, there is empire building. For Russia, no amount of land has ever been enough. The Russian imperial dream has been “from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” They already have the Pacific, but the idea of rolling through to the Atlantic seems doomed, seeing how Putin’s incompetent army can’t even roll through Ukraine.
Second, there is the question of pride, or the collective national ego. Putin wants to show the world that “America is not the boss.” America has plenty of problems of its own, and it doesn’t feel the need to be flexing its military muscle to show the world “who is the boss.” Other concerns are more pressing at this time.
Both reasons could be summarized as “ambition.” More specifically, it’s Putin’s personal ambition. Now, Napoleon was also ambitious, but at least he was a brilliant military commander. Still, he made the mistake of invading Russia (and Hitler, undeterred, went to to repeat the mistake). And Putin, being rather puny compared with his ambitious predecessors, will be remembered as the inept dictator who fought a tragic, idiotic war to annex Ukraine, and wrecked the Russian Federation.
(As for the image of the little boy: I think it's child abuse.)
Putin and Prince Charles, St. Petersburg, 1994. I find Putin’s oversize clothes strangely symbolic.
Joseph Milosch:
Is there a connection between early Christian support for Emperor Constantine and the support of dictators by Christians today? I wonder reading this statement: In Russia the true religion is not Orthodox Christianity; it is the extension of the reactionary state to inspire a sense of wonder. Their secular religion is to dwell on a mythical past concocted by Kremlin-sponsored think tanks.
Since the start of Putin’s War, every article about Russia reminds me of the Conservative Christians in the United States. In the 1990s, the C street Republicans, a group of conservative Christian lawmakers, resided in Washington, DC. Calling themselves The Family, they favorably compared Stalin and Putin to Christ and admired these leaders for creating a plutocracy and kleptocracy controlled by a white oligarchic elite.
During the Clinton administration, the conservative think tanks started to evolve an American myth that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood’s movies promoted. Whereas Russian mythos exalts a mythical empire, the American myth glorifies the gun culture of the Wild West. It describes a legendary landscape where the hero, a white man, dictated social justice and established the American way through the barrel of his gun.
The western gun culture evolved from the gun culture of the Plantations. In this story, white men upheld honor and justice with firearms. The clans settled their feuds with rifles and pistols, and women depended on armed men to protect them. The good Native Americans and the enslaved Africans admired the white man’s intelligence and power. In one of their movies, Disney portrayed slavery as a black man singing zippy-do-dah.
In America, Fox News and QAnon Conspiracies promote the Myth of America developed by the Republican think tanks. Is the United States headed for a country where hatred for civilization is a staple of citizenship, the majority live in poverty, and mass shootings are as common as McDonald’s? In the last twenty years, I have never heard a Republican referred to as a person with great purity of character.
Nor have I heard of a world leader referring to more than one or two Republicans as a person of high moral and physical courage.
International reporters and their government refer to Republicans as fanatics and extremists. These are the terms used to define Putin today. The descriptions are the same ones describing Germany in 1939 when the country was spiraling out of control, and the German Christians supported Hitler.
Oriana:
I can certainly see the similarity between Putin’s worship of the mythical greatness of Russia and the right-wing worship of “traditional values” — a term used by Putin as well, publicly praising the “traditional family” while privately making his former gay lovers rich. Handsome gay men like Medvedev can enjoy positions of both wealth and power, while the average Russian helplessly swallows the imperial propaganda that distracts him from finding out about the oligarchs' real estate and other investments in the West, and and of course those notorious mega-yachts.
*
*
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty— never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” ~ Winston Churchill
*
USSR AT WAR
~ Year 1941 was dismal for us, but 1942 was hardly any better. During that period, Stalin epically blew the huge advantage we had ahead of the war. It took about one year and a half for the USSR to level the field and start rolling back the Germans from the banks of the Volga river in the battle of Stalingrad.
The top three reasons for our military failures during the initial period of the Soviet German war in 1941–45 were:
1. Wrong kind of war
During the 1930s, the Red Army was preparing to wage a totally new type of war. It was supposed to be a very mobile one on our part. We were going to overwhelm the enemy with swift movements of tanks, motorized infantry and massive commandos operations far behind the enemy lines. Our doctrine was the one of “deep operations"
The only problem was, we assumed that the enemy was going to wage a WW1-type static war. This turned out totally wrong-headed.
When Hitler struck in June 1941, we had to fight an enemy who moved faster than us. We found ourselves on the business end of something very reminiscent of “deep operations”.
As a result, the logistics created for our massive counter-strikes were thrown up in the air. Our intelligence was chronically outpaced by the course of actions. Even on the occasions when the Red Army had the resources to strike behind the German lines, by the time they hit the targets the advancing Germans already had moved somewhere else.
My father was in the division-level artillery at the time. He recalled that the major frustration during the first months was their supplies being constantly intercepted or destroyed by the Germans before they arrived. The intelligence and logistics simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of German advancement.
2. Continuation of the Civil War
A few years before the war, Stalin dealt a mortal blow to our 100-million strong private peasantry. They were robbed of their property and corralled into collective farms. A massive famine struck in the process large grain-producing areas of Ukraine, southern Russia, Siberia and Kazakhstan.
The Red Army was essentially a peasant army. The peasant recruits didn’t forget what Stalin had done to them.
During the first months on the war, more than 3 million soldiers choose to surrender to the Germans rather than to die defending Soviet rule. (Hitler didn’t appreciate that and let most of them die in captivity from hunger and diseases.)
At least 1 million Soviet citizens—according to some researchers, more than 2 million—joined the Germans against their own country during the war.
The hate among the troops against the Communists was so strong that Stalin had to declare families of those who surrendered, traitors. In practical terms, it meant they were stripped of food rations and risked slow starvation. Trotsky’s barrier troops were reintroduced to make sure no one would “step back” at the most critical points of defense. In 1942, Stalin issued the famous Order No. 227 where retreating Soviet troops were declared legitimate targets for our fire as the advancing German ones.
Even during the Stalingrad battle there were cases of Soviet defections to the Germans (about 1/4 of the German 6th Army were Soviet nationals). Yet, the autumn and winter 1942–43 marked a profound turn in the mood of the troops. It became plain to everyone that Hitler was no way better than Stalin. Competent work on the part of the Party commissaries and the secret police ensured the level of compliance that allowed to Stalin to restore ideological control over the troops. The general mood on the Soviet side became grim, uncompromising determination.
3. Weak middle level
The recurring problem of Russian civilization throughout our history has been an awful lack of middle-level administrative talent. This applies as much to the government as the military. No matter how much ingenuity, self-sacrifice and superhuman endurance was generated at the grass roots, and how unique, sharp minds would operate at the top, the weakness of managerial muscle that connects the two, time after time defeated the effort.
Memoirs of German generals recount interviews with captured Soviet top officers where they complained of poor performance of the officers in the field. This was the result of poor training and the lack of a strong sergeant corps, as well as a rigid top-heavy system of command.
Many months of combat experience at last assured to the Red Army the critical level of middle-level management competence. Field Marshal Mannstein wrote in his memoirs that the Red Army in 1941-42 visibly improved in its middle level, especially with the introduction of smaller rifle divisions and the rifle brigades that were within the capabilities of new inexperienced commanders.
Only, it took innumerable lives of soldiers and officers for the Red Army to get there. Once the threshold of battle savvy was reached, our troop became the terminal killing machine that sealed the fate of Nazi Germany.
*
Below, a group of Soviet PoWs in summer 1941. They seem to be relieved, but we know that by Christmas ‘41 almost all of them would be certainly dead. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Michael Mills:
“The hate among the troops against the Communists was so strong that Stalin had to declare families of those who surrendered, traitors. In practical terms, it meant they were stripped of food rations and risked slow starvation. “
Stalin also decreed that Red Army soldiers who surrendered rather than fighting to the death were traitors and deserved to die. For that reason he did nothing to help the Soviet POWs held by the Germans, and refused to authorize the International Red Cross to intervene on their behalf. That refusal to assist Soviet personnel who surrendered to the Germans was a major factor in their very high death rate during the winter of 1941–42.
Stalin’s attitude towards his men in German captivity stands in great contrast to that of the French Government, which se up a whole Government department to provide aid to the two million French POWs held by the Germans throughout the war. That department channeled large amounts of food aid to those POWs through the International Red Cross, which is the main reason why almost all of them survived until the end of the war.
*
WHEN COLLECTIVE TRAUMA BECOMES COLLECTIVE AMNESIA
~ The State Hermitage Museum, gem of Saint Petersburg, pride of imperial and Soviet Russia. Founded by Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest ruling woman, and containing one of—if not the—largest art collections in the world. Egyptian antiquities, Italian renaissance, Dutch masters, impressionists, cubists, the canon of the art world housed in six buildings, including the Winter Palace, a 460-room mansion built for Catherine herself.
Now imagine the Hermitage in the context of forty degrees below zero, no electricity, no running water, frozen and bursting sewage pipes, air raids and bombings, anti-aircraft guns, shelling, destroyed buildings, rats, starvation in the hundreds of thousands.
Imagine the grandiose halls hung with empty frames: valuable art shipped away for protection while Hermitage staff hide in the basement next to the corpses of their frozen colleagues. Imagine curators and art historians giving tours to sailors, describing absent paintings from memory in exchange for scraps of charred bread. Imagine skin papery from thirst, gums rotting from scurvy and dystrophy.
A scene so surreal it can only be real. This was the Siege of Leningrad, September 1941 to January 1944, when Nazi Germany blockaded the city and kept it in a state of total deprivation, aided by Soviet negligence and resource-hoarding.
The siege contains within its 872-day duration all the cruelties and ironies of Soviet life. For contemporary Russian writer, scholar, and poet Polina Barskova, this particular history symbolizes Soviet mythology, deceit, and hollow grandeur—and the traumatic tension between public and private memory.
Barskova’s latest releases translated into English look at the Siege to resurrect the dead and through the Siege to comprehend other horrors, both personal and collective. Air Raid is a book of polyphonic poetry (Ugly Duckling Presse, October 2021, tr. Valzhyna Mort), and Living Pictures is a collection of short prose, including historical fiction, autofiction, and a surrealist play (New York Review Books, September 2022, translated by Catherine Ciepiela).
Both books contrast mournful private (and often secret) recollections with triumphant, euphemistic, and forgetful public commemoration. Versions told by autocrats and family men trample diary entries and letters. Stories, or rather silences, around the Siege have haunted Leningrad-native Barskova her entire life. Here, as a writer and archivist, she turns that haunting inside out to examine the very nature of trauma and survival.
The suppressed versions of the Siege unfurl a gruesome list: anti-aircraft fire, bombings, corpses, dystrophy, hunger, rats, scurvy, suicide. (A litany seems most appropriate here since trauma violates all sense of time and logic.)
In Air Raid poems, bodies become street decoration: Corpses were often left on the ground in winter, wrapped in colorful sheets (“by the corpses in amber, by the corpses in turquoise”) so that they’d be easier to find come spring when collected by the “truckload.” Bodies also become food cravings: “Which stranger / passed by the snowbank she was frozen into. / Her galoshes stuck out like two prunes on a wedding cake.” Other Air Raid poems speak in the voices of blockade diarists who live amidst a new landscape: “We step over the corpses / We run over the corpses we hide under the corpses / as if it were a common thing.”
The dead even seep into contemporary sections of Living Pictures: “Maybe we’d pathetically caress each other again, or maybe we’d die instantly, like the homeless during an early freeze, and they’d collect our bodies in the morning.”
There’s no way to reference the Siege without talking about food. In both books, hunger for anything that even remotely resembles food illustrates the shame of blockade life. One speaker in Living Pictures describes in halting lines: “…throbbing you lick the bowl clean weep scan the table howl lick again.” Another laughs at how eating coffee grounds has become a rare treat. In Air Raid, one resorts to “chew[ing] on iron” and all six parts of a string of poems are spent in a panic: “Ration cards missing! / Ration cards missing!”
Another ugly truth of blockade life, unspoken in official versions, is lice. They are invisible characters in the final installment of Living Pictures, a short play about that very Hermitage scene. Two lovers slowly starve and go mad—they’re not “essential workers” deemed worthy of ration cards. One character already knows that Party officials and Hermitage employees are living and dying two totally different versions of the story: “The living have lice, and the dead, too. If there’s one thing that unites us during the blockade, it’s that. They bite at Party headquarters, and they bite us here in our basement.”
Euphemisms paper over these gruesome details and the eventual million deaths. In the official rendition of the Siege, Leningrad’s victims were selfless heroes who enabled Soviet victory over the Nazis. A poem in Air Raid renders radio broadcasts with their lofty sloganeering: “Geopolitics! Teutons at the border! / Fire and infestations of Reich!” In the play at the end of Living Pictures, a character complains: “…they just go on about the same thing—victorious battles and the defenders’ valor. Don’t look here, look over there!” The pivoting neck, the whiplash of looking at and away from atrocity, is the aftermath of state-compliant storytelling.
It’s not just radio broadcasts that blare and rattle off lies. Motifs of opera and theater recur in Barskova’s poetry and prose, a nod to the Soviet penchant for making everything heroic and displaying it on the backdrop of a red velvet curtain with the twin silhouettes of father Lenin and father Stalin. For Barskova, these Siege retellings become a kind of circus, the wild black bear now subdued and balancing a pink ball on its nose. We all clap. In Mort’s translation, the melodramatic Siege aria becomes “Blockade the Musical,” America’s closest equivalent to the Soviet triumphant genre.
When applying Siege logic to a contemporary narrator managing American life, the story again becomes about public versus private. In Living Pictures, an unhoused individual taking a shit in a San Francisco metro station becomes a “changeling of the ‘public-private,’” a rift between what’s supposed to be seen and what’s not.
These collections bring to mind Grace M. Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, a work of scholarship, fiction, sociology, literary criticism, and personal memory. Cho examines starvation, deprivation, and state violence during the Korean War, a conflict that implicates both the United States and the Soviet Union. Of the secrecy surrounding Korean women forced into sexual labor with U.S. service men, Cho writes: “not seeing is not done innocently.”
Even a children’s playground is not innocent. Barskova and her childhood friends always played in Victory Park, but no one talked about how those very same grounds were used to house, burn, and bury the bodies of Siege victims. Victory begat on the backs of mass graves, children’s swings planted in the soil of the dead. But Barskova will not let them be forgotten or erased: “flying along with us were those somber blockade children.”
These things are too ugly for history. As one Air Raid poem warns:
As Eugene Ostashevsky writes in the forward to Living Pictures, Soviet (and contemporary) public memory recast the horrors of the Siege as “voluntary contributions towards the purchase of victory.”
What Soviet dictators could not anticipate is how denial breeds the obsessive writing and researching of subsequent generations. Cho describes the ghosts of unaddressed trauma as “irrational,” “schizophrenic,” and “incoherent,” but also “creative” and containing “productive potential.” As narrator and guide through these two books, Barskova makes the unprocessed grief come alive. She spins it into non-narrative and non-linear poems and prose, a pastiche which mimics the very nature of traumatic memory: disassociated and halting. Barskova mobilizes the ghosts and secrets to shine a floodlight on other histories of abuse.
Not every horrible thing causes trauma — that’s one thing our contemporary discussions get wrong. For some people, a violent event can be metabolized and reflected upon down the road as “that one time.” For others, the same exact violent event leaves behind nightmares, flashbacks, full-body stiffness, and illness.
Events and experiences can become traumatic when they exceed human capacity for understanding. When people do not have trusted adults willing or able to hold them, see them, hear them, honor their feelings, let them process. When the event repeats with impunity. When the nervous system never returns to a resting state. When people are surrounded by silence or an entire deceitful system.
It’s in this gap that trauma lies. Loud monuments, parades, and flags drown out and deny the dystrophics, the bodies under snow, the mass arrests and purges. Eugene Ostashevsky describes it as “a kind of traumatic hypocrisy.”
In no other moment during our lifetimes has this cruel dissonance been clearer and more devastating than the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has claimed that the occupation is needed to “de-Nazify” the country, whose rulers are supposedly teeming with neo-fascists. Meanwhile Ukrainian refugees number in the millions, including half of all the country’s children, and civilian deaths number around 13,000, though reliable figures are difficult to come by.
These contemporary crimes are only possible in a society that has no collective understanding, let alone collective responsibility. World War II is called “The Great Patriotic War,” and in the country’s imagination, Russia was the liberator of Europe and all the sacrifices were just an aside. Neither the mass starvation and destruction in Leningrad, nor the massacre of 20,000 Polish officials in Katyn, nor the occupation of the Baltic States, nor Russia’s non-aggression pact with Hitler earlier in the war were a problem — the ends justified the means.
Russia today wants to turn collective trauma into collective amnesia. Instead it’s time for a new mythology and new leadership. When interviewed for The Atlantic earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated this sentiment: “[Russians] are afraid to admit guilt… they have to learn to accept the truth…[they need] leaders who can then come in and say, ‘Yes, we did that.’”
What’s needed now more than ever is an end to euphemism. I look to the activists, writers, and artists, many in exile or living abroad like Barskova, who continue to push for an honest discussion of Russia’s role in the world, then and now. ~
https://lithub.com/when-collective-trauma-becomes-collective-amnesia-reading-polina-barskova-on-russias-myth-of-itself/?fbclid=IwAR37j43mPNeECBfuoCFOXFXL1Dx3INmjEO3f5uOyew0IKU3GnLy029rpjyM
Mary: THE VOICE OF THE POET BECOMES THE VOICE OF MEMORY AND CONSCIENCE
*
PROBLEMS WITH RUSSIAN SOCIETY (Dima Vorobiev)
The Communist rule modernized the economy, but froze the nation socially, culturally and politically. In many ways, we are a nation with a XIX-century mentality that wields XXI-century technologies. Suboptimal output is the result.
Weak, or non-existent civil society. Where the state is not doing its job, everything collapses.
The economy has been bleeding money and brains on an epic scale for 30 years, non-stop. The increasing scarcity of qualified workers, engineers and scientists is crippling the economy outside some small areas of industrial growth. People and money that headed for exit left a huge hole where the independent Russian middle class, the guarantor of democracy and the rule of law, should have been now.
*
CAN THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY SUSTAIN THE WAR WITH UKRAINE?
~ Russian soldiers are not being paid. They are deserting in the Donbas region. Much of their equipment is being destroyed and not being replaced. Russia has not moved the battle lines in 60 days. They are bringing in Chechen fighters to stop desertions of their soldiers.
Russia does have a large national reserve fund which was almost $200b in February. However in the war, $200b will not last long.
The Russian economy is being hit by inflation and production shortages. There is high unemployment. Much of their GDP (40%) walked out when the war started.
But Russians are used to having nothing. I don’t think we are near the point when the economy can no longer sustain the war. ~ Brent Cooper
All the money in the world does not matter if no one with superior tech won’t trade with Russia. The sanctions are biting harder than the official Russian line will say. For a population that has had a taste and glimpse of life in an EU or Western economy, living under sanctions is onerous.
This is an economy that couldn’t manufacture enough washing machines before the invasion. How much worse is it now?
In the future, we will look back and likely point out some event that was pivotal, but was not recognized as such at the time. The attacks on military facilities in Crimea, with Russian vacationers sunning themselves on the beaches, followed by the traffic jam on the Kerch Bridge, then the closing of that bridge to civilian traffic. This could be the thing that brings Russian opposition to the war to critical mass much sooner than it might have during Napoleon’s or Hitler’s misadventures.
Oriana:
Perhaps I could be accused of thinking like a poet, but for me the sinking of the Moskva (the flagship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, named after the city of Moscow) was a pivotal event. Incredibly symbolic. It was blamed on two sailors smoking next to the ship's ammunition store. I wonder if Putin’s propaganda writers realize what an image of Russia they are promoting. Oh those clumsy, careless Russians, always either falling out of windows or smoking next to ammunition depots.
*
PUTIN’S KLEPTOCRACY IS A CARGO CULT OF THE WESTERN DEMOCRACY
~ Fake parliament. Fake courts. Fake elections. Fake officials. Fake patriotism. Fake propaganda. Fake roads that last one year. Fake planes that barely fly. All taking advantage of the infrastructure and industries built by the defunct country, Soviet Union.
And the thing is Kleptocrats can’t stop stealing because that’s become their religion — they have to keep outdoing one another in imitation of the Western material status.
My fellow Russians living hand to mouth, I want to congratulate you on the great news. It’s a perfect occasion to feel patriotic pride and shed tears of joy.
The most expensive super-yacht in the world was purchased by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, his sixth to date, Kleptocracy’s former agent of influence in London.
The man hasn’t done a day of work in the past two decades except for spending your money abroad. A valuable member of society. Not of yours, my fellow Russians.
The super-yacht cost 42 billion rubles. That’s four annual budgets of Cherepovets, population 316,000, one of many God forsaken towns spread across one seventh of the world’s terrain where people plant veggie gardens to survive. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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GOLIATHS VERSUS RUST BUCKETS — WERE WESTERN INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS SURPRISED BY THE INCOMPETENCE OF THE RUSSIAN ARMY?
~ As an old intelligence analyst, I can say with confidence that it is complicated.
The intelligence community has long been divided into two camps. We used to call them the “Goliaths” and “Rust Buckets.” The Goliaths believed that the Soviets (and later the Russians) could push massed armor through the Fulda Gap into Central Europe and that it would be almost impossible to hold them back. Their only hope was for NATO to somehow hold on for six weeks until the US got its act together.
The Rust Buckets believed that the systemic corruption, the lack of logistics and communications, and the poor training of Russian conscripts, along with the complete lack of an NCO or junior officer corps would result in a mountain of blown up tanks and dead Russians in the Fulda Gap.
If you talked to the generals, they were all Goliaths. If you talked to majors, they were all Rust Buckets. But the error had to be made on the side of caution we had to prepare for a Goliath army.
I was obviously a Rust Bucket. But I was still shocked at the ineptness of the Russian performance. Especially inept was the failure of the Russian air forces to establish air superiority or be able to conduct any sort of combined arms operations. And I am still astounded by the Russian decision to break its forces into smaller Battalion Tactical Groups of armor with little or no infantry. Given the lack of communications gear, instead of making these smaller groups more agile, they actually made them far more vulnerable.
But no one was surprised at the corruption, the lack of equipment maintenance, the lack of training, and the stupidly silly top-down command structure. But no one really thought the Russians would try to fight a major war without communications equipment, using cheap Chinese walkie-talkies and personal cell phones to do so. ~
R.W. Carmichael, Quora
Martin Boston:
One of the overrun vehicle parks near Izium contained SP and towed guns with split, burst and deformed barrels! I think they started failing some time ago and replacements are not available. I seem to remember that the barrels were made in Mariupol . . .
The Russian military is incredibly corrupt and ineptly led. They did not prepare for anything. Even in peacetime you train and maintain. They did not even do that.
Putin is a typical autocrat. He has surrounded himself with “yes” men who only tell him what he wants to hear.
The Russian military has acted with equal ineptitude in every military outing since WWII. And even in WWII, it lost twice as many soldiers as necessary through ineptitude. The most recent was the First Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 which was also an almost unmitigated disaster that failed to accomplish most of its objectives. But the Russian military learned nothing from the experience. They just persisted in their insular and unreal military delusions.
But they could not do any better in the Kyiv salient. They were confined to roads because of blown bridges, rising rivers and streams, muddy fields, and bad tires. They had to flee in disorder because they never committed even half the troops necessary to carry the day.
The Russians are now operating on a huge long front and are vastly over-extended as a result. They simply do not have enough troops to defend it all. And the Ukrainians get to pick and choose where they attack. And when the Russians try to shift forces to compensate, they only create new weak points for the Ukrainians to exploit.
NO amount of planning, training, and proper maintenance could compensate for such a poorly conceived plan of attack. Russia showed up at a gunfight of their own making with a pocket knife.
Dave A:
Decades ago, I was in the ‘‘Goliath" camp. Only thing is back then it was the only sane position.
Back then, the USSR had 300 million folk, a huge draftee army, but with a 24-month draft and hardly any exemptions. The entire Warsaw Pact was regularly pushing out Soviet military equipment that was a real challenge to our best and producing all that in monster quantities. All this was the case BEFORE the microprocessor. Beyond all that, the Fulda Gap was all but a hop, skip and a jump from East Germany and because of France’s pull out from NATO, NATO found itself with no strategic depth.
That the USSR’s production of civilian goods was a tasteless joke was irrelevant. Their military equipment inspectors were hard nosed and if output didn’t meet the requirements, everyone knew your next stop could be the Gulag.
What changed all that was Ogarkov’s article in the early 1980s saying a new technological arms race was required and laying out what was needed in about a third of a page of newsprint.
The then Soviet leadership (Brezhnev, Kosygin, Chernenko, etc.) rather firmly decided against him and it since it was unaffordable, unnecessary given their existing weapons, and unbelievable to them.
By the time the problem was obvious to anyone and Ogarkov was proven right; the USSR was done and gone and so was the Warsaw Pact, IGB [Inner German Border] and Cold War.
Greg Lukanuski:
As another old intelligence analyst, I was expecting (A) if Ukraine was politically decapitated like Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russian Army could conceivably have stumbled into its objectives; or (B) if Ukrainians were willing to fight, the Russian Army would have taken losses like Grozny in 1995. What ended up happening was (B) Ukrainians being willing to fight, plus (C) after taking loses, Russia having inadequate forces to continue an advance, plus (D) NATO and the US supplying Ukraine with training, weapons and munitions to continue the fight. But to be honest, I incorrectly believed that Putin would have remembered Grozny, known the risk of Ukrainians being willing to fight, and gauged the probability of NATO/US providing assistance, and therefore not have attacked at all.
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. . . detoxing with humor: perhaps this is the real meaning of the puzzling phrase, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
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WHICH COMMUNIST COUNTRIES LASTED LONGEST
~ Of all countries that proclaimed Communism as their objective, the Soviet Union lasted the longest.
Formally it existed from 1922 through 1991, i.e. 69 years. From the moment when the Communists assumed power in 1917, this makes 74 years.
Number 2 on this list is North Korea. The country was proclaimed in 1948. In 2009 references to Communism as an objective were dropped from the Constitution. This makes 61 years.
Cuban Communism lasted from 1965 until the 2019 Cuban constitutional referendum that allowed private property. This makes 54 years.
(China de-facto dropped the Communist project in favor of one-party market economy at the end of the 1970s, when Deng and his comrades decided that some individuals should be allowed to become rich "before the objective of common prosperity [pure communism] is achieved". The Party stopped representing a specific class, but instead the "interests of the entire people", including “entrepreneurs”, i.e. Socialist capitalists. Party members were allowed to engage in private activities. This way, the Communist project in China lasted about 30 years. In 1990s, Laos and Vietnam went through the same bourgeois transformation.)
The ideologues of Soviet propaganda seemed totally oblivious to the double edge of the message. The idea of peace boomeranged—and the younger generations of State and Party functionaries decided that a peaceful consumerism and bourgeois self-indulgence indeed made much more sense than the hardship of class struggle and world revolution. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Anna Hag:
After the Stalin death in 1953, USSR gradually went back to capitalism. We had a dual economy system. Second economy was a shadow economy with capitalism and enormous illegal cash flow.
In 1991 I was living in the communist farm in Israel. It was called “ kibbutz Palmachim.” It was a heaven on the Earth. I was really lucky to be there. However the farm went bankrupt in 2000 since the Israeli government of Biniamin Netanyahu stopped to subsidize it. Anyway I am proud that my country (I am an Israeli) achieved some sort of communism for a while. In the kibbutz everything was owned and regulated by the kibbutz members. Workers in kibbutz worked for free. There is no money needed because in the farm supermarket was everything for free, free food, free clothes, free education, free medicine etc for members of kibbutz. The profit of kibbutz was redistributed absolutely equal between all members of kibbutz where director and toilet cleaner of kibbutz had the same share in redistributed wealth.
Unfortunately Communist economy is a beautiful utopia that can be rarely practiced because of its economic insufficiency. However socialism is practiced everywhere in different degree.
Mary:
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PUTIN AND THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
~ Something interesting happened after Putin was threatening to use nukes a couple of months back. Or, more to the point, what’s interesting is what didn’t happen — Putin stopped threatening to use his nukes. Now, why would that be?
You see, when a leader threatens to use nukes, the first thing that needs to take place, is that all the launch systems need to be checked. There are specific test protocols that need to be performed to ensure everything works as it should.
Now, what follows is pure conjecture — nothing more than a theory. You decide whether it’s plausible or not.
When the Nuclear Strategic Arm of the Russian forces started the test protocols on their nuclear missiles what occurred scared all of them shitless. The nuclear warheads armed themselves, and threatened to detonate in their silos. Only some brilliant action by technicians who managed to disarm the nukes before they went off. This left Russians afraid of their own weapons, and fearful of trying to launch them.
Remember Stuxnet? This is the computer worm, allegedly developed by Israel and the USA, that infected the Iranian uranium enrichment control systems and destroyed their uranium centrifuges.
Do you imagine that the USA could resist trying the same game with the Russian nuclear deterrent?
It wouldn’t have been that difficult.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Russian military-industrial complex went into steep decline. Their R&D institutes were starved of funds, which were diverted into secret bank accounts, or used for the purchase of super-yachts. The answer — the alternative to home-grown technology — was to purchase western technology. It was cheap, and readily available.
And so the 1960’s and 1970’s vintage missile command and control systems were replaced with western digital technology. Most likely of Windows XP vintage. Where the hacks and back doors are well known. Easy meat for the CIA.
So, when the Russian Nuclear Strategic Arm technicians started their launch test protocols something truly horrible happened. OK — so they found the virus and fixed it.
But this left them with a frightening dilemma — was this the bug that they were supposed to find?
And Putin has been kind of quiet with his nuclear threats recently. ~ Andy Kotlarz, Quora
Kerry Chivers:
When you make these threats you can’t take them back. You have used up the last of your ammunition. And Putin would have to have the consent of his military for such an absurdly reckless step. It means Russia can’t win the war because there’s no more Russia.
Geoff Tittenson:
The arming mechanism on nuclear warheads breakdown because of the harsh radiation and need to be renewed or replaced every five years.
If the lack maintenance that we’ve seen on other aspects of their military hardware is any indication, the warheads probably don’t work, the maintenance money was spent on yachts by the corrupt oligarchs.
Andon K:
It’s is possible that Russians have performed a check of their nuclear equipment and the results are really disastrous, so somebody persuaded Putin not to talk about any more, because it would be a huge embarrassment for Russia if they try to use some of their nukes.
But I still don’t think it’s the reason Putin doesn’t use nuclear threats any more. It seems to me that is more because he saw his threats were producing no effect and no one in the West chickened out.
Another possibility is that West sent him a very discreet but a very clear and convincing message what would happen to Russia if he tries to play games with nukes.
But the Russian state propaganda still peddle BS about Russia nuking the world without any limits. All the time they are showing animations on TV about European capitals being destroyed by Russian invincible nukes. They were even bragging that the UK will get so many nukes that it will “sink into the sea”. Childish…
David Koster:
The Soviet era nuclear arsenal is like a very old and badly stored box of fireworks — nobody knows what will happen unless the blue touch paper is lit.
The Soviet era submarine fleet is in a terrible shape, decommissioned nuclear subs are getting their old reactors literally dumped in the Kara sea, some with fuel still in them.
Brian Coley:
Most of what you see of Russian military equipment doesn't work or doesn't work as great as the Russians claim it should. This is because of corruption. Maintenance is not carried out. Nuclear weapons need to be regularly maintained and reprocessed. This has not been done in Russia. Most deployed Russian nuclear weapons will not work. I think Putin has just been informed of this.
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PUTIN’S NEWEST JUSTIFICATION FOR INVADING
~ Russian president Vladimir Putin on Friday said he sent Russian forces into Ukraine in February in response to the West wanting to break up Russia, Reuters is reporting.
Putin was speaking at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Discussing the war publicly for the first time since Ukraine’s dramatic counter-offensive ousted Russian troops from the Kharkiv region last week, Putin threatened continued strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, and said: “We will see how [Ukraine’s counteroffensive] ends.”
Oriana:
I don’t remember a single instance of the West threatening to break up Russia. The closest thing may have been some discussion in social media over how some republics may decide to leave the Russian Federation after Russia’s full defeat in Ukraine.
Still, it's interesting that Putin should mention the breakup of the Russian Federation. Having witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, he is obviously aware that empires are vulnerable to falling apart.
Would anyone be surprised if it did happen? After the Soviet collapse (as Putin sees it, "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century"), no one assumes that a country is eternal. Any country is vulnerable to the "decline and fall" syndrome. As Vonnegut might comment, "So it goes."
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EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES IN IZIUM
Kharkiv governor: Izium mass grave site is 'blood, brutal terror’
At the mass grave site in Izium, about 99% of the bodies exhumed today showed signs of a violent death, said Oleg Synegubov, the regional governor, on Telegram.
“This is bloody, brutal terror,” he said. Synegubov described how many of the graves weren’t even marked with names – just with numbers.
While authorities said some of those buried at the grave site had likely been killed by shelling and airstrikes, investigators have prepared themselves for the worst, after the discoveries of dead civilians bearing signs of torture in Bucha and other previously occupied territories.
Synegubov said that today, exhumers uncovered several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and one person “with a rope around his neck.” “Obviously, these people were tortured and executed,” he said “There are also children among the buried.”
Investigators will conduct forensic examinations on the exhumed bodies. “After the identities of the dead have been identified, all of them will be buried with due respect,” Synegubov said. “Each death will be investigated and will become evidence of Russia’s war crimes in international courts.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/sep/16/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskiy-compares-scenes-in-izium-to-bucha-massacre-live-updates#top-of-blog
Maria Andeyeva:
Exhumation of hundreds of unmarked graves near Izyum. Witnesses confirmed to me that they saw people people being shot on the streets by Russians. Others died from shelling and a lack of access to healthcare. So horrible, I can hardly breathe.
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RUSSIA AND CHINA: WHAT’S MISSING?
Trust.
This is what’s missing in the relationship between Russia and China. Here are Top Three Reasons for why we don’t trust each other more.
1. Too little cultural overlap
Here’s a little telling detail. In the glamor-obsessed Moscow, conspicuous consumption almost always involves Western things: personal jets, Italian cars, British shoes, Manhattan properties. Meanwhile, “Chinese glamor” sounds like a joke in Moscow.
Also, the Chinese civilization is “Lord-of-the-Rings” old. They have a thousand-year view on things. China has a kind of cultural continuity that’s simply unimaginable in Russia.
In our neck of the woods, those who dare to plan more than a year ahead are called strategists and visionaries. We like to think of ourselves as heirs to Imperial Russia that was annihilated a century ago. But apart from the language and artifacts, the era before the Communists is almost alien to us.
2. History
Starting from the 17th century, we took from China the dependencies on the territories that are now our Far East. Only the stupidity of our Czar prevented Russia from conquering Manchuria at the start of the 20th century, and making the whole place “Yellow Russia”. The city of Port Artur and the entire Liaodong Peninsula could have been our big ice-free base at the Pacific Rim.
Our relations in 1960s-70s were as close to war as it gets. Nowadays, we keep mum about the border clashes in 1969 at Damansky/Zhenbao. But they are vividly remembered by the Chinese. In their memory, it’s kept on the same shelf as Gromyko’s backstage inquiry in Washington about how the Americans would react if we nuked PRC, which followed the shootout at the border.
The Chinese reciprocated during the Afghan war. Their massive role in arming the Muslim insurgents against the Soviet Army in the early 1980s is tightly wrapped in secrecy on both sides for the time being. However, it can be unwrapped in no time if necessary, just like our anti-Ukrainian grievances were weaponized at the time of Crimea annexation in 2014. [This article was written before the Invasion of Ukraine in February 2022).
3. Self-serving China
Putin and Xi might appear as BBF for now, but the fact remains the Chinese do nothing for us out of charity. Their model of economic cooperation with us follows the African model: they are willing to build things for us all right, but only when it ties us to them as their extractive mine and buyer of their manufactured products. And they want to build everything themselves.
Technology transfers and sharing expertise? You must be kidding.
A little-known but sad fact is, the Chinese banks and many other heavyweights keep observing the Western economic sanctions after 2014. We occupy so little place on their list of priorities that whenever the Americans threaten to squeeze them out for non-compliance with the sanctions, they prefer to keep the Americans happy, not us.
(They keep answering that our own Sberbank, mobile operators and many others in Russia observe the Western sanctions too. Still, this hurts.)
In real life the Russian bear is much smaller in size than both the US and PRC. Behind the scene, the power balance between us and the Chinese more and more looks like the picture below—and no one knows if the Chinese panda bear will forever be that benevolent big brother it seems to be now.
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A CONSPIRACY MENTALITY: WHY SOME PEOPLE FALL FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES
~ Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realizes, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Polling evidence suggests that Oliver’s views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK.
Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum [Editor’s note: This article was written before 2020 election conspiracies and the rise of pandemic-related conspiracies]. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.
You realize, of course, that Oliver’s theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question ‘Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?’ is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn’t like asking why they believe it’s raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It’s obvious why people believe it’s raining when they have compelling evidence, but it’s far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn’t an inside job.
I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character.
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Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person’s reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver’s belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a ‘rationalizing explanation’ of his belief.
Let’s flesh out Oliver’s story a little: suppose it turns out that he believes lots of other conspiracy theories apart from the one about 9/11. He believes the Moon landings were faked, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by MI6, and that the Ebola virus is an escaped bioweapon. Those who know him well say that he is easily duped, and you have independent evidence that he is careless in his thinking, with little understanding of the difference between genuine evidence and unsubstantiated speculation.
Suddenly it all begins to make sense, but only because the focus has shifted from Oliver’s reasons to his character. You can now see his views about 9/11 in the context of his intellectual conduct generally, and this opens up the possibility of a different and deeper explanation of his belief than the one he gives: he thinks that 9/11 was an inside job because he is gullible in a certain way. He has what social psychologists call a ‘conspiracy mentality’.
The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded.
Notice that the proposed character explanation isn’t a rationalizing explanation. After all, being gullible isn’t a reason for believing anything, though it might still be why Oliver believes 9/11 was an inside job. And while Oliver might be expected to know his reasons for believing that 9/11 was an inside job, he is the last person to recognize that he believes what he believes about 9/11 because he is gullible. It is in the nature of many intellectual character traits that you don’t realize you have them, and so aren’t aware of the true extent to which your thinking is influenced by them. The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded. The only hope of overcoming self-ignorance in such cases is to accept that other people – your co-workers, your spouse, your friends – probably know your intellectual character better than you do. But even that won’t necessarily help. After all, it might be that refusing to listen to what other people say about you is one of your intellectual character traits. Some defects are incurable.
Gullibility, carelessness and closed-mindedness are examples of what the US philosopher Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind (1996), has called ‘intellectual vices’. Others include negligence, idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail. Intellectual character traits are habits or styles of thinking. To describe Oliver as gullible or careless is to say something about his intellectual style or mind-set – for example, about how he goes about trying to find out things about events such as 9/11. Intellectual character traits that aid effective and responsible enquiry are intellectual virtues, whereas intellectual vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. Humility, caution and carefulness are among the intellectual virtues Oliver plainly lacks, and that is why his attempts to get to the bottom of 9/11 are so flawed.
Oliver is fictional, but real-world examples of intellectual vices in action are not hard to find. Consider the case of the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. Abdulmutallab was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to affluent and educated parents, and graduated from University College London with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was radicalized by the online sermons of the Islamic militant Anwar al-Awlaki, who was subsequently killed by an American drone strike. It’s hard not to see the fact that Abdulmutallab was taken in by Awlaki’s sermons as at least partly a reflection of his intellectual character. If Abdulmutallab had the intellectual character not to be duped by Awlaki, then perhaps he wouldn’t have ended up on a transatlantic airliner with explosives in his underpants.
Intellectual character explanations of questionable beliefs are more controversial than one might imagine. For example, it has been suggested that explaining peoples’ bad behavior or weird beliefs by reference to their character makes us more intolerant of them and less empathetic. Yet such explanations might still be correct, even if they have deleterious consequences. In any case, it’s not obvious that character explanations should make us less tolerant of other peoples’ foibles. Suppose that Oliver can’t help being the kind of person who falls for conspiracy theories. Shouldn’t that make us more rather than less tolerant of him and his weird beliefs?
A different objection to character-based explanations is that it’s just not true that people have questionable beliefs because they are stupid or gullible. In How We Know What Isn’t So (1991), the US social psychologist Thomas Gilovich argues that many such beliefs have ‘purely cognitive origins’, by which he means that they are caused by imperfections in our capacities to process information and draw conclusions. Yet the example he gives of a cognitive explanation takes us right back to character explanations. His example is the ‘hot hand’ in basketball. The idea is that when a player makes a couple of shots he is more likely to make subsequent shots. Success breeds success.
Gilovich used detailed statistical analysis to demonstrate that the hot hand doesn’t exist – performance on a given shot is independent of performance on previous shots. The question is, why do so many basketball coaches, players and fans believe in it anyway? Gilovich’s cognitive explanation is that belief in the hot hand is due to our faulty intuitions about chance sequences; as a species, we’re bad at recognizing what genuinely random sequences look like.
And yet when Gilovich sent his results to a bunch of basketball coaches, what happened next is extremely revealing. One responded: ‘Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less.’ This seems like a perfect illustration of intellectual vices in operation. The dismissive reaction manifested a range of vices, including closed-mindedness and prejudice. It’s hard not to conclude that the coach reacted as he did because he was closed-minded or prejudiced. In such cases as this, as with the case of Oliver, it’s just not credible that character traits aren’t doing significant explanatory work. A less closed-minded coach might well have reacted completely differently to evidence that the hot hand doesn’t exist.
Could we explain the dismissiveness of the coach without referring to his personality in general? ‘Situationists’, as they are called, argue that our behavior is generally better explained by situational factors than by our supposed character traits. Some see this as a good reason to be skeptical about the existence of character. In one experiment, students at a theological seminary were asked to give a talk elsewhere on campus. One group was asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, while the rest were assigned a different topic. Some were told they had plenty to time to reach the venue for the lecture, while others were told to hurry. On their way to the venue, all the students came across a person (an actor) apparently in need of help. In the event, the only variable that made a difference to whether they stopped to help was how much of a hurry they were in; students who thought they were running late were much less likely to stop and help than those who thought they had time. According to the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman, the lesson of such experiments is that ‘we need to convince people to look at situational factors and to stop trying to explain things in terms of character traits’.
You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission
The character traits that Harman had in mind are moral virtues such as kindness and generosity, but some situationists also object to the idea of intellectual virtues and vices. For example, they point to evidence that people perform much better in problem-solving tasks when they are in a good mood. If trivial situational factors such as mood or hunger are better at explaining your intellectual conduct than your so-called intellectual character, then what is the justification for believing in the existence of intellectual character traits? If such traits exist, then shouldn’t they explain one’s intellectual conduct?
Absolutely, but examples such as Oliver and Gilovich’s basketball coach suggest that intellectual character traits do explain a person’s intellectual conduct in an important range of cases. People don’t believe weird things because they are hungry or in a bad (or good) mood. The view that people don’t have character traits such as gullibility, carelessness or prejudice, or that people don’t differ in intellectual character, deprives us of seemingly compelling explanations of the intellectual conduct of both Oliver and the basketball coach.
Suppose it turns out that Oliver lives in a region where conspiracy theories are rife or that he is under the influence of friends who are committed conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t these be perfectly viable situational, non-character explanations of his beliefs about 9/11? Only up to a point. The fact that Oliver is easily influenced by his friends itself tells us something about his intellectual character. Where Oliver lives might help to explain his beliefs, but even if conspiracy theories are widespread in his neck of the woods we still need to understand why some people in his region believe them, while others don’t.
Differences in intellectual character help to explain why people in the same situation end up believing such different things. In order to think that intellectual character traits are relevant to a person’s intellectual conduct, you don’t have to think that other factors, including situational factors, are irrelevant. Intellectual character explains intellectual conduct only in conjunction with a lot of other things, including your situation and the way your brain processes information. Situationism certainly would be a problem for the view that character traits explain our conduct regardless of situational factors, but that is not a view of character anyone has ever wanted to defend.
In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. You say that he dismisses the official account of 9/11 because he is closed-minded; he accuses you of closed-mindedness for refusing to take conspiracy theories seriously. If we are often blind to our own intellectual vices then who are we to accuse Oliver of failing to realize that he believes his theories only because he is gullible?
These are all legitimate questions, but it’s important not to be too disconcerted by this attempt to turn the tables on you. True, no one is immune to self-ignorance. That doesn’t excuse Oliver. The fact is that his theory is no good, whereas there is every reason to believe that aircraft impacts did bring down the Twin Towers. Just because you believe the official account of what happened in 9/11 doesn’t make you gullible if there are good reasons to believe that account.
Equally, being skeptical about the wilder claims of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doesn’t make you closed-minded if there are good reasons to be skeptical. Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence. It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that what counts as good evidence is a subjective matter. To say that Oliver lacks good evidence is to draw attention to the absence of eye-witness or forensic support for his theory about 9/11, and to the fact that his theory has been refuted by experts. Oliver might not accept any of this but that is, again, a reflection of his intellectual character.
Once you get past the idea that Oliver has somehow managed to turn the tables on you, there remains the problem of what to do about such people as him. If he is genuinely closed-minded then his mind will presumably be closed to the idea that he is closed-minded. Closed-mindedness is one of the toughest intellectual vices to tackle because it is in its nature to be concealed from those who have it. And even if you somehow get the Olivers of this world to acknowledge their own vices, that won’t necessarily make things any better. Tackling one’s intellectual vices requires more than self-knowledge. You also need to be motivated to do something about them, and actually be able to do something about them.
Should Oliver be condemned for his weaknesses? Philosophers like to think of virtues as having good motives and vices as having bad motives but Oliver’s motives needn’t be bad. He might have exactly the same motivation for knowledge as the intellectually virtuous person, yet be led astray by his gullibility and conspiracy mentality. So, both in respect of his motives and his responsibility for his intellectual vices, Oliver might not be strictly blameworthy. That doesn’t mean that nothing should be done about them or about him. If we care about the truth then we should care about equipping people with the intellectual means to arrive at the truth and avoid falsehood.
Education is the best way of doing that. Intellectual vices are only tendencies to think in certain ways, and tendencies can be countered. Our intellectual vices are balanced by our intellectual virtues, by intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness, curiosity and rigor. The intellectual character is a mixture of intellectual virtues and vices, and the aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices. The philosopher Jason Baehr talks about ‘educating for intellectual virtues’, and that is in principle the best way to deal with people such as Oliver. A 2010 report to the University College London Council about the Abdulmutallab case came to a similar conclusion. It recommended the ‘development of academic training for students to encourage and equip them not only to think critically but to challenge unacceptable views’. The challenge is to work out how to do that.
What if Oliver is too far gone and can’t change his ways even if he wanted to? Like other bad habits, intellectual bad habits can be too deeply entrenched to change. This means living with their consequences. Trying to reason with people who are obstinately closed-minded, dogmatic or prejudiced is unlikely to be effective. The only remedy in such cases is to try to mitigate the harm their vices do to themselves and to others.
Meanwhile, those who have the gall to deliver homilies about other peoples’ intellectual vices – that includes me – need to accept that they too are likely very far from perfect. In this context, as in most others, a little bit of humility goes a long way. It’s one thing not to cave in to Oliver’s attempt to turn the tables on you, but he has a point at least to this extent: none of us can deny that intellectual vices of one sort or another are at play in at least some of our thinking. Being alive to this possibility is the mark of a healthy mind. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/bad-thinkers?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Knowing that our thinking is full of cognitive errors leads us to all kinds of conundrums. If someone asks, "How could anyone think that Islam is the one and only true religion?" we know that the obvious reply is "How could anyone think that Christianity is the only true religion?" One needs to rise above such question to realize that all religions are human creations -- and to mourn the fact that fictional statements ab0ut fictional deities have led to very real atrocities. Likewise, millions lost their lives because of horrible and ultimately genocidal ideologies like Nazism or Communism. Language and the capacity for abstract thinking have proved a two-edged sword.
We wish everyone had the capacity to doubt and question, but it seems that humans have not evolved to be skeptics. The wish to believe something, anything, is a powerful human trait. No one would win an election with the slogan, "We simply don't know."
Not even science can provide a perfect knowledge. The advantage of science is that it evolves in response to new evidence. But only a minority have a scientist's drive for discovering the truth, even if that truth goes against comforting beliefs. The most surprising thing about science is that it even exists.
Mary: FALSE NARRATIVES SUPPORT OUR PREJUDICES
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ONE DAY YOU TOO WILL BE OLD AND UNCOOL
Words of wisdom from the “older generation”:
“Social media is not reality and your entire life should not revolve around it.” – @RickGrimesSnotBubble
“Things will likely take significantly longer to achieve than you think.” – @Dull-College
"Life is NOT like a video game where you just keep leveling up. Sometimes, what you built will fall apart, and you will have to repeatedly do the same thing over and over…However, don't beat yourself up about it - this is normal. And with experience, you will also become more adept at facing and resolving problems, so each time the same problem repeats, you will be better at solving them.” – @EmpRupus
“Everything you do as a teenager will be cringe to your children.” – @divinetrackies
You won't 'feel' different when you're older, or have kids. You'll just be you, it's weird.” – @Poshspicer
“Today's eyebrows are yesterday's clown makeup.” – @Lardinho
"In 15 years you’re going to think the kids have gone too far and they’re going to think you’re old-fashioned.” – @neat_machine
“Getting good at stuff will take time. Sometimes lots of time. And sometimes, you'll spend lots of time on something, and you still won't get good at it. That's the human experience. Some things you struggle with will come very easily to others, but some things they struggle with will come very easily to you. Don't be mad that someone possesses skills you don't, and don't be a jerk for possessing skills that many other people don't.” – @OskeeWootWo
"Being controversial isn't the same as being interesting.” – @HezFez238
“School has a system in place to keep you from falling behind, life doesn’t.” – @Corey854
“Just because you fucked up does NOT mean you’re a fuckup.” – @Mr_Murder1
“Just because it's new to you doesn't mean it's new.” – @Broad_word_1690
“As you get older you just keep realizing how dumb you were last year.” – @Comparison_Past
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Sajid Ali:
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HOW THE BLACK DEATH RESHAPED EUROPE
~ The outbreak of plague in Europe between 1347-1352 – known as the Black Death – completely changed the world of medieval Europe. Severe depopulation upset the socio-economic feudal system of the time but the experience of the plague itself affected every aspect of people's lives.
Before the plague, the feudal system rigidly divided the population in a caste system of the king at the top, followed by nobles and wealthy merchants, with the peasants (serfs) at the bottom. Medical knowledge was received without question from doctors who relied on physicians of the past and the Catholic Church was considered an even higher authority on spiritual matters.
Women were largely regarded as second-class citizens and the art and architecture of the time reflected the people's belief in a benevolent God who responded to prayer and supplication. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas on rodents, and the actual cause of the plague, was unknown to the people of the time and so did not factor into this world view.
Life at this time was by no means easy, or even sometimes pleasant, but people knew – or thought they knew – how the world worked and how to live in it; the plague would change all that and usher in a new understanding which found expression in movements such as the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance.
The plague came to Europe from the East, most probably via the trade routes known as the Silk Road overland, and certainly by ship oversea. The Black Death – a combination of bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic plague (and also possibly a strain of murrain) – had been gaining momentum in the East since at least 1322 and, by c. 1343, had infected the troops of the Mongol Golden Horde under the command of the Khan Djanibek (r. 1342-1357) who was besieging the Italian-held city of Caffa (modern-day Feodosia in Crimea) on the Black Sea.
As Djanibek's troops died of the plague, he had their corpses catapulted over the city's walls, infecting the people of Caffa through their contact with the decomposing corpses. Eventually, a number of the city's inhabitants fled the city by ship, first arriving at Sicilian ports and then at Marseilles and others from whence the plague spread inland. Those infected usually died within three days of showing symptoms and the death toll rose so quickly that the people of Europe had no time to grasp what was happening, why, or what they should do about the situation. Scholar Norman F. Cantor comments:
The plague was much more severe in the cities than in the countryside, but its psychological impact penetrated all areas of society. No one – peasant or aristocrat – was safe from the disease, and once it was contracted, a horrible and painful death was almost a certainty. The dead and dying lay in the streets, abandoned by frightened friends and relatives. (Civilization, 482)
As the plague raged on, and all efforts to stop its spread or cure those infected failed, people began to lose faith in the institutions they had relied on previously while the social system of feudalism began to crumble due to the widespread death of the serfs, those who were most susceptible as their living conditions placed them in closer contact with each other on a daily basis than those of the upper classes.
The plague ran rampant among the lower class who sought shelter and assistance from friaries, churches, and monasteries, spreading the plague to the clergy, and from the clergy it spread to the nobility. By the time the disease had run its course in 1352, millions were dead and the social structure of Europe was as unrecognizable as much of the landscape since, as Cantor notes, “many flourishing cities became virtual ghost towns for a time” (Civilization, 482) and crops lay rotting in the fields with no one to harvest them.
Before the plague, the king was thought to own all the land which he allocated to his nobles. The nobles had serfs work the land which turned a profit for the lord who paid a percentage to the king. The serfs themselves earned nothing for their labor except lodging and food they grew themselves. Since all land was the king's, he felt free to give it as gifts to friends, relatives, and other nobility who had been of service to him and so every available piece of land by c. 1347 was being cultivated by serfs under one of these lords.
Europe was severely overpopulated at this time and so there was no shortage of serfs to work the land and these peasants had no choice but to continue this labor – which was in essence a kind of slavery – from the time they could walk until their death. There was no upward mobility in the feudal system and a serf was tied to the land he and his family worked from generation to generation.
As the plague wore on, however, depopulation greatly reduced the workforce and the serfs' labor suddenly became an important – and increasingly rare – asset. The lord of an estate could not feed himself, his family, or pay tithes to the king or the Church without the labor of his peasants and the loss of so many meant that survivors could now negotiate for pay and better treatment. The lives of the members of the lowest class vastly improved as they were able to afford better living conditions and clothing as well as luxury items.
Once the plague had passed, the improved lot of the serf was challenged by the upper class who were concerned that the lower classes were forgetting their place. Fashion changed dramatically as the elite demanded more extravagant clothing and accessories to distance themselves from the poor who could now afford to dress more finely than in their previous rags and blankets. Efforts of the wealthy to return the serf to his previous condition resulted in uprisings such as the peasant revolt in France in 1358, the guild revolts of 1378, the famous Peasants' Revolt of London in 1381. There was no turning back, however, and the efforts of the elite were futile. Class struggle would continue but the authority of the feudal system was broken.
Effects on medicine
The challenge to authority also affected received medical knowledge and practice. Doctors based their medical knowledge primarily on the work of the Roman physician Galen (l. 130-210) as well as on Hippocrates (l. c. 460 - c. 370 BCE) and Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE), but many of these works were only available in translations from Arabic copies and, often, poor ones. Even so, the works they had were put to the best use they possibly could be. Scholar Jeffrey Singman comments:
Medieval science was far from primitive; in fact, it was a highly sophisticated system based on the accumulated writings of theorists since the first millennium BCE. The weakness of medieval science was its theoretical and bookish orientation, which emphasized the authority of accepted authors. The duty of the scholar [and doctor] was to interpret and reconcile these ancient authorities, rather than to test their theories against observed realities.
Doctors and other caregivers were seen dying at an alarming rate as they tried to cure plague victims using their traditional understanding and, further, nothing they prescribed did anything for their patients. It became clear, by as early as 1349, that people recovered from the plague or died from it for seemingly no reason at all. A cure that had restored one patient to health would fail to work on the next.
After the plague, doctors began to question their former practice of accepting the knowledge of the past without adapting it to present circumstances. Scholar Joseph A. Legan writes:
Medicine slowly began changing during the generation after the initial outbreak of Plague. Many leading medical theoreticians perished in the Plague, which opened the discipline to new ideas. A second cause for change was while university-based medicine failed, people began turning to the more practical surgeons…With the rise of surgery, more attention was given to the direct study of the human body, both in sickness and in health. Anatomical investigations and dissections, seldom performed in pre-plague Europe, were pursued more urgently with more support from public authorities.
The death of so many scribes and theoreticians, who formerly wrote or translated medical treatises in Latin, resulted in new works being written in the vernacular languages. This allowed common people to read medical texts which broadened the base of medical knowledge. Further, hospitals developed into institutions more closely resembling those in the modern-day. Previously, hospitals were used only to isolate sick people; after the plague, they became centers for treatment with a much higher degree of cleanliness and attention to patient care.
Change in religious attitude
Doctors and theoreticians were not the only ones whose authority was challenged by the plague, however, as the clergy came under the same kind of scrutiny and inspired the same – or far greater – doubt in their abilities to perform the services they claimed to be able to. Friars, monks, priests, and nuns died just as easily as anyone else – in some towns, religious services simply stopped because there were no authorities to lead them - and, further, the charms and amulets people purchased for protection, the services they did attend, the processions they took part in, the prayer and the fasting, all did nothing to stop the spread of the plague and, in some instances, encouraged it.
The Flagellant Movement, in which groups of penitents would travel town to town whipping themselves to atone for their sins, began in Austria and gained momentum in Germany and France. These groups, led by a self-proclaimed Master with little or no religious training, not only helped spread the plague but also disrupted communities by their insistence on attacking marginalized groups such as the Jews.
Since no one knew the cause of the plague, it was attributed to the supernatural (such as supposed Jewish sorcery) and, specifically, to God's fury over human sin. Those who died of the plague were suspect of some personal failing of faith and yet it was clear that the same clergy who condemned them died of the same disease in the same way. Scandals within the Church, and the extravagant lifestyle of many of the clergy, combined with the mounting deaths from the plague to generate widespread distrust of the Church's vision and authority.
Increased persecution and migration
The frustration people felt at their helplessness in the face of the plague gave rise to violent outbursts of persecution across Europe. The Flagellant Movement was not the only source of persecution; otherwise peaceful citizens could be whipped into a frenzy to attack communities of Jews, Romani (gypsies), lepers, or others. Women were also abused in the belief that they encouraged sin because of their association with the biblical Eve and the fall of man.
The most common targets, however, were the Jews who had long been singled out for Christian hostility. The Christian concept of the Jew as “Christ Killer” encouraged a large body of superstition which included the claim that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in unholy rituals, that this blood was often spread by Jews on the fields around a town to cause plague, and that the Jews regularly poisoned wells in the hopes of killing as many Christians as possible.
Jewish communities were completely destroyed in Germany, Austria, and France – in spite of a bull issued by Pope Clement VI (l. 1291-1352) exonerating the Jews and condemning Christian attacks on them. Large migrations of Jewish communities fled the scenes of these massacres, many of them finally settling in Poland and Eastern Europe.
Women’s rights
Women, on the other hand, gained higher status following the plague. Prior to the outbreak, women had few rights. Scholar Eileen Power writes:
In considering the characteristic medieval ideas about women, it is important to know not only what the ideas themselves were but also what were the sources from which they spring…In the early Middle Ages, what passed for contemporary opinion [on women] came from two sources – the Church and the aristocracy.
Neither the medieval Church nor the aristocracy held women in very high regard. Women of the lower classes could work as bakers, milkmaids, barmaids, weavers, and, of course, as laborers with their family on the estate of the lord but had no say in directing their own fate. The lord would decide who a girl would marry, not her father, and a woman would go from being under the direct control of her father, who was subject to the lord, to the control of her husband who was equally subordinate.
Women's status had improved somewhat through the popularity of the Cult of the Virgin Mary which associated women with the mother of Jesus Christ, but the Church continually emphasized women's inherent sinfulness as daughters of Eve who had brought sin into the world.
After the plague, with so many men dead, women were allowed to own their own land, cultivate the businesses formerly run by their husband or son, and had greater liberty in choosing a mate. Women joined guilds, ran shipping and textile businesses, and could own taverns and farmlands. Although many of these rights would be diminished later as the aristocracy and the Church tried to assert its former control, women would still be better off after the plague than they were beforehand.
Art and architecture
The plague also dramatically affected medieval art and architecture. Artistic pieces (paintings, wood-block prints, sculptures, and others) tended to be more realistic than before and, almost uniformly, focused on death. Scholar Anna Louise DesOrmeaux comments: “Some plague art contains gruesome imagery that was directly influenced by the mortality of the plague or by the medieval fascination with the macabre and awareness of death that were augmented by the plague. Some plague art documents psychosocial responses to the fear that plague aroused in its victims. Other plague art is of a subject that directly responds to people's reliance on religion to give them hope.”
The most famous motif was the Dance of Death (also known as Danse Macabre) an allegorical representation of death claiming people from all walks of life to come with him. As DesOrmeaux notes, post-plague art did not reference the plague directly but anyone viewing a piece would understand the symbolism. This is not to say there were no allusions to death before the plague, only that such became far more pronounced afterwards.
Architecture was similarly influenced, as noted by Cantor:
In England, there was a parallel increased austerity in architectural style which can be attributed to the Black Death – a shift from the Decorated version of French Gothic, which featured elaborate sculptures and glass, to a more spare style called Perpendicular, with sharper profiles of buildings and corners, less opulent, rounded, and effete than Decorated…The cause may have been economic – less capital to spend on decoration because of heavy war taxation and reduction of estate incomes because of labor shortage and higher peasants' wages.
Since peasants could now demand a higher wage, the kinds of elaborate building projects which were commissioned before the plague were no longer as easily affordable, resulting in more austere and cost-effective structures. Scholars have noted, however, that post-plague architecture also clearly resonated with the pervasive pessimism of the time and a preoccupation with sin and death.
It was not only the higher wages demanded by the peasant class, nor a preoccupation with death that affected post-plague architecture, however, but the vast reduction in agricultural production and demand due to depopulation which led to an economic recession. Fields were left uncultivated and crops were allowed to rot while, at the same time, nations severely limited imports in an effort to control the spread of the plague which only worsened their economies as well as those of their former trading partners.
The widespread fear of a death one had not earned, could not see coming, and could not escape, stunned the population of Europe at the time and, once they had somewhat recovered, inspired them to rethink the way they were living previously and the kinds of values they had held. Although little changed initially, by the middle of the 15th century radical changes – unimaginable only one hundred years before – were taking place throughout Europe, notably the Protestant Reformation, the agricultural shift from large-scale grain-farming to animal husbandry, the wage increase for urban and rural laborers, and the many other advances associated with the Renaissance.
Plague outbreaks would continue long after the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century but none would have the same psychological impact resulting in a complete reevaluation of the existing paradigm of received knowledge. Europe – as well as other regions – based its reactions to the Black Death on traditional conventions – whether religious or secular – and, when these failed, new models for understanding the world had to be created. ~
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1543/effects-of-the-black-death-on-europe/
COFFEE WITH HITLER
~ When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, public reaction in Britain was not that of unalloyed horror. Instead, it lay somewhere between disinterest, snobbish, if inaccurate, contempt (“the man’s a house painter!”), and, in some circles, quiet satisfaction that a vigorous reformer had shaken up his country in an apparently effective and forward-looking fashion.
The evils of the Nazi regime were obvious to anyone with either a social conscience or a knowledge of history, but it was more convenient either to ignore them, or, in the case of a group of well-meaning but misguided society figures, to attempt to mitigate them by means of the so-called Anglo-German Fellowship.
In this fascinating and deeply researched debut historical biography by businessman turned historian Charles Spicer, the leading lights of the Fellowship paint an unimpressive picture. They consisted of “a leftwing, pacifist Welsh political secretary, a conservative, butterfly-collecting Old Etonian businessman and a pioneering Great War fighter ace”. They were better known as David Lloyd George, Ernest Tennant and the Duke of Hamilton, and they combined high social standing with an unfortunate tendency to pursue freelance diplomacy unchecked either by government intervention or common sense. As Spicer writes, “they infiltrated the Nazi high command deeper than any of their countrymen to pass back better intelligence to both their government and its domestic critics”.
Unfortunately, this infiltration was not a one-way street. While many, even most, of the British members of the Anglo-German Fellowship were Germanophiles rather than Nazi sympathizers, there was a fine line between cultural appreciation of the country’s literature and art and the more ambiguous ideas expressed by such shadowy figures as the historian TP Conwell-Evans, a man jocularly described by Lloyd George as “my Nazi” and a leading member of the Fellowship.
Over cosy dinners and cocktail receptions, the likes of Tennant and Hamilton believed that they could act as a moderating influence between the British government and the German high command, but their continued presence at these events gave such figures as Himmler and Ribbentrop, the eventual German ambassador to Britain, a reassuring picture of the potential opposition they faced. After all, many leading figures in British society were pro-German in the 30s. Rothermere’s Daily Mail published articles praising Hitler and editorials declaring “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” This was accentuated by the accession of Edward VIII, a man who was described approvingly by Ribbentrop as “a kind of English National Socialist”. For a moment, it genuinely seemed as if amicable relations would persist between the two countries, thanks in part to the work of the Fellowship.
Spicer describes his intentions in writing Coffee With Hitler as being explicitly about those who sought to “civilize” rather than “appease” the Nazis. The book works well as a companion to Tim Bouverie’s fine Appeasing Hitler, focusing less on the well-known events and figures of the era and more on the gentlemanly amateur diplomats of the day. Both appeasers and civilizers overrated their own abilities and underestimated the evils to which they – largely unwittingly – played handmaiden. This engaging book offers a warning from history that remains terrifyingly relevant today. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/04/coffee-with-hitler-by-charles-spicer-british-amateurs-who-tried-to-civilise-the-nazis-review-polite-society-v-the-nazis
Oriana:
Meanwhile, there was an isolationist sentiment in the U.S. This photo was taken in New York, 1941.
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HOW A HUGUENOT PHILOSOPHER SHOWED THAT ATHEISTS CAN BE MORALLY GOOD
~ For centuries in the West, the idea of a morally good atheist struck people as contradictory. Moral goodness was understood primarily in terms of possessing a good conscience, and good conscience was understood in terms of Christian theology. Being a good person meant hearing and intentionally following God’s voice (conscience). Since an atheist cannot knowingly recognize the voice of God, he is deaf to God’s moral commands, fundamentally and essentially lawless and immoral. But today, it is widely – if not completely – understood that an atheist can indeed be morally good. How did this assumption change? And who helped to change it?
One of the most important figures in this history is the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). His Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682), nominally dedicated towards taking down erroneous and popular opinions about comets, was a controversial bestseller, and a foundational work for the French Enlightenment. In it, Bayle launches a battery of arguments for the possibility of a virtuous atheist.
He begins his apology on behalf of atheists with a then-scandalous observation:
It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible?
Bayle introduces his readers to virtuous atheists of past ages: Diagoras, Theodorus, Euhemerus, Nicanor, Hippo and Epicurus. He notes that the morals of these men were so highly regarded that Christians later were forced to deny that they were atheists in order to sustain the superstition that atheists were always immoral. From his own age, Bayle introduces the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585-1619), who had his tongue cut out before being strangled and burned at the stake for denying the existence of God. Of course, those who killed Vanini in such a fine way were not atheists. The really pressing question, Bayle suggests, is whether religious believers – and not atheists – can ever be moral.
Bayle concedes that Christians possess true principles about the nature of God and morality (we’ll never know whether Bayle himself was an atheist). But, in our fallen world, people do not act on the basis of their principles. Moral action, which concerns outward behavior and not inward belief, is motivated by passions, not theories. Pride, self-love, the desire for honor, the pursuit of a good reputation, the fear of punishment, and a thousand customs picked up in one’s family and country, are far more effective springs of action than any theoretical beliefs about a self-created being called God, or the First Cause argument. Bayle writes:
Thus we see that from the fact that a man has no religion it does not follow necessarily that he will be led to every sort of crime or to every sort of pleasure. It follows only that he will be led to the things to which his temperament and his turn of mind make him sensitive.
Left alone to act on the basis of their passions and habitual customs, who will act better: an atheist or a Christian? Bayle’s opinion is clear from the juxtaposition of chapters devoted to the crimes of Christians and chapters devoted to the virtues of atheists. The cause of the worst crimes of Christians is repeatedly identified as false zeal, a passion that masquerades as the love of God but that really amounts to politico-religious partisanship mixed with hatred of anyone who is different. Bayle’s survey of recent religious wars demonstrated in his mind that religious beliefs enflame our more violent tendencies:
We know the impression made on people’s minds by the idea that they are fighting for the preservation of their temples and altars … how courageous and bold we become when we fixate on the hope of conquering others by means of God’s protection, and when we are animated by the natural aversion we have for the enemies of our beliefs.
Atheists lack false religious zeal, so we can expect them to live quieter lives.
Yet Bayle does not fully establish the possibility of a virtuous atheist. The kind of behavior that he focuses on is merely superficially good. In Bayle’s time, to be truly good was to have a conscience and to follow it. In the Various Thoughts, he doesn’t declare that atheists can have a good conscience. In fact, Bayle’s pessimism reaches its pinnacle in a thought experiment involving a visit from an alien species. Bayle claims that it would take these aliens less than 15 days to conclude that people do not conduct themselves according to the lights of conscience. In other words, very few people in the world are, properly speaking, morally good. So atheists are merely no worse than religious believers, and on the surface they might even appear morally superior. While this is less ambitious than claiming that atheists can be completely virtuous, it is still a milestone in the history of secularism.
Bayle expanded on his Various Thoughts twice in his career, once with Addition to the Various Thoughts on the Comet (1694) and again with Continuation of the Various Thoughts on the Comet (1705). In this latter work, Bayle established the foundations of a completely secular morality according to which atheists could be as morally virtuous as religious believers. He begins his discussion of atheism with the strongest objection he could muster against the possibility of a virtuous atheist:
Because [atheists] do not believe that an infinitely holy Intelligence commanded or prohibited anything, they must be persuaded that, considered in itself, no action is either good or bad, and that what we call moral goodness or moral fault depends only on the opinions of men; from which it follows that, by its nature, virtue is not preferable to vice.
The challenge Bayle undertakes is to explain how atheists, who do not recognize a moral cause of the Universe, can nevertheless recognize any kind of objective morality.
He offers an analogy with mathematics. Atheists and Christians will disagree about the foundation of mathematical truths. Christians believe that God is the source of all truth, while atheists do not. However, metaphysical disagreements over the source of the truth of triangle theorems make no difference when it comes to proving triangle theorems. Christians and atheists all come to the conclusion that the sum of the angles inside every triangle is equal to two right angles. For the purposes of mathematics, theological views are irrelevant. Similarly for morality: whether one believes that the nature of justice is grounded in the nature of God or in the nature of a godless Nature makes no difference. Everyone agrees that justice requires that we keep our promises and return items that we have borrowed.
Bayle’s most surprising argument is that Christians and atheists are in agreement about the source of the truths of morality. The vast majority of Christians believe that God is the source of moral truths, and that moral truth is grounded in God’s nature, not in God’s will or choice. God cannot make killing innocent people a morally good action. Respecting innocent life is a good thing that reflects part of God’s very nature. Furthermore, according to Christians, God did not create God’s nature: it has always been and always will be what it is.
At bottom, these Christian views do not differ from what atheists believe about the foundation of morality. They believe that the natures of justice, kindness, generosity, courage, prudence and so on are grounded in the nature of the Universe. They are brute objective facts that everyone recognizes by means of conscience. The only difference between Christians and atheists is the kind of ‘nature’ in which moral truths inhere: Christians say it is a divine nature, while atheists say it is a physical nature. Bayle imagines critics objecting: how can moral truths arise from a merely physical nature? This is indeed a great mystery – but Christians are the first to declare that God’s nature is infinitely more mysterious than any physical nature, so they are in no better position to clarify the mysterious origins of morality!
According to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, our age became secular when belief in God became one option among many, and when it became clear that the theistic option was not the easiest one to espouse when theorizing about morality and politics. Through his reflections on atheism over three decades, Bayle demonstrated that resting morality on theology was neither necessary nor advantageous. For that reason, Bayle deserves much credit for the secularization of ethics. ~
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-a-huguenot-philosopher-realised-that-atheists-could-be-virtuous
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CHRISTIANITY IN STEEP DECLINE, ON TRACK TO BECOME A MINORITY RELIGION
~ A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that America's Christian majority has been shrinking for years, and if recent trends continue, Christians could make up less than half the U.S. population within a few decades.
The study found that Christians accounted for about 90% of the population 50 years ago, but as of 2020 that figure had slumped to about 64%.
"If recent trends in switching [changing one's religious affiliation] hold, we projected that Christians could make up between 35% and 46% of the U.S. population in 2070," said Stephanie Kramer, the senior researcher who led the study.
The study modeled four scenarios for how religious affiliation could change, and in every case it found a sharp drop in Christianity.
While the study does not grapple with the question of why Christians are disaffiliating from their religion, Kramer said there are some theories that could help explain this phenomenon.
"Some scholars say that it's just an inevitable consequence of development for societies to secularize. Once there are strong secular institutions, once people's basic needs are met, there's less need for religion," Kramer said.
"Other people point out that affiliation really started to drop in the '90s. And it may not be a coincidence that this coincides with the rise of the religious right and more associations between Christianity and conservative political ideology.”
For Campbell, conflict between the teachings of her faith and her own personal identity and values were at the core of her decision to leave.
"For me, especially, when I started to come out as queer, it became impossible for me to reconcile this church that was basically admitting that they wanted kids like me dead or suicidal," she said. "I decided I had to choose myself and choose my well-being.”
RELIGIOUSLY UNAFFILIATED COULD BECOME THE MAJORITY
Alongside Christian numbers in the U.S. trending down, the Pew study also found that the percentage of people who identify as "religiously unaffiliated" is rising and could one day become a majority.
"That's where the majority of the movement is going," Kramer said. "We don't see a lot of people leaving Christianity for a non-Christian religion.”
Importantly, Kramer said, "religiously unaffiliated" is not synonymous with atheist, as the term also includes those who identify as "agnostic," "spiritual" or "nothing in particular.”
In the four scenarios that Pew modeled, Americans who were religiously unaffiliated were projected to approach or overtake Christians in number by 2070. At the same time, the percentage of those following other religions was expected to double.
"It's almost what I expect," Hasan Tauha, a student at Stanford University, said of the rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated people in the United States.
"I don't think it's surprising. I think it's a product of modern comforts. I think when life is good, religion is just not as important."
Tauha was not raised Christian. He spent most of his life as a devout Muslim but decided four years ago to leave his religion, and he now identifies as atheist.
Tauha's process of turning away from his faith was not just a matter of changing his beliefs; it involved disconnecting with the religious community he had been involved with for his entire life.
“The process of leaving the faith, for me, was kind of torturous," he said. "[But] I look back on my experience and leaving the faith as something generally productive and positive. In fact, I'd say it remains the formative experience in my life [and] gave me a new sense of direction. So I look back on it fondly.” ~
Oriana:
For me, the crucial statement here is this: “[The steep decline in religion] is a product of modern comforts. When life is good, religion is just not as important.”
“Modern comforts” are due chiefly to the progress of technology. Already the poet Czeslaw Milosz suggested that the decline of religion is due not to science per se, but due to technology. Technology makes us feel more in control. When we become sick, we turn to medicine, not prayer. Our children are much more likely to survive to adulthood than in the past. Life is far from being a paradise, but it’s much easier than it used to be — and measures like contentment and life expectancy have shown a healthy increase.
Will religion ever become extinct? No. There’ll always be some religious movements, but they’ll be marginal. I realize we won’t see this in our lifetime. Even as it’s dying, religion still has the power to do harm (note the religious right -- though fortunately we are past religious wars, witch burnings, the Inquisition -- religion's centuries-long trail of blood). But the direction of the trend can no longer be questioned.
I was also interested in the statement that leaving religion can be a positive formative experience. It was that for me. I suddenly knew that I was not a coward who could be intimidated with threats of hell. Eventually I came to identify with Freud's statement that the voice of the intellect is very soft, but it will not cease until it is heard.
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VEGETARIAN WOMEN AT HIGHER RISK OF HIP BONE FRACTURE
~ Women who are vegetarian are more likely to experience hip fractures in later life than those who frequently eat meat, a UK study has found.
Researchers analyzed health and diet records from more than 26,000 women and found that over a roughly 22-year period, vegetarians were a third more likely to break a hip than those who regularly ate meat.
The reasons for the greater risk are unclear but researchers suspect some vegetarians may not get sufficient nutrients for good bone and muscle health, leaving them prone to falls and fractures.
“The message for vegetarians is don’t give up your diet, because it is healthy for other things and environmentally friendly, but do take care to plan well and don’t miss out on nutrients that you exclude when you don’t eat meat or fish,” said Dr James Webster, a researcher at the University of Leeds.
Vegetarian diets are often considered healthier than meat-containing diets and they can reduce the risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and certain cancers. But the study published in BMC Medicine highlights the importance of a balanced diet whatever people eat.
“It’s likely that vegetarians, for one reason or another, and potentially because of lower intakes of important nutrients, have weaker bones and lower muscle mass and both of those things predispose people to hip fractures,” Webster said.
About 90% of hip fractures are linked to falls, which are more common in older people, who tend to be more frail and have weaker bones. But fractures can often drive further frailty, which increases the risk of more falls and worse frailty.
The researchers suspect vegetarians are more likely to be underweight than meat eaters, and that beyond having weaker bones and muscles may also have less fat, which can act as a cushion when people fall.
Given the findings, Webster said vegetarians may want to consider eating fortified cereals with added iron and B12 for bone health, and to ensure they are getting enough protein, through foods such as nuts, legumes and beans.
The researchers drew on data from the UK Women’s Cohort Study, which is tracking women over time to assess links between diet and health. Records for 26,318 women aged 35 to 69 revealed that 822, or 3%, had hip fractures in a roughly 22-year period. About 28% of the women were vegetarians and 1% were vegans.
The researchers compared the rate of hip fractures in vegetarians, pescatarians – those who eat fish but not meat – and occasional meat eaters with frequent meat easters. The frequent meat eaters ate meat at least five times a week.
Webster said more work was needed to see if vegetarian men had a similarly greater risk of hip fractures. Previous work suggests vegetarian men and women have poorer bone health on average when compared with meat-eaters “but risk of hip fracture in male vegetarians still remains unclear”, he said.
Eating less meat is one of the most important lifestyle changes people can make to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Research from Leeds University last year found that non-vegetarian diets created 59% more emissions than vegetarian ones.
In work published in 2020, Dr Tammy Tong, a senior nutritional epidemiologist, and others at the University of Oxford, found that compared with meat eaters, vegetarians had a 25% greater risk of hip fractures, with the risk even higher for vegans at 31%.
Vegetarians in the Leeds study had a lower body mass index (BMI) than regular-meat eaters, lower protein intake and lower vitamin D intake, “all of which are potential risk factors for hip fracture,” she said.
“Vegetarians should pay particular attention to maintaining a healthy body weight, and making sure that they have an adequate intake of protein and other nutrients important for bone health, including calcium and vitamin D.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/11/vegetarian-women-fracture-hips-study-bone-health
Oriana:
And let's not forget Vitamin K2, found in animal products such as cheese. It's essential for directing calcium to the bones and teeth. Insufficient K2 leads to the calcification of arteries.
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FOUR TOXINS FOUND IN FOOD
MYRISTICIN
Myristicin is a chemical compound that can spark hallucinations, delirium and feelings of euphoria. In large quantities, it can cause neurological damage and be fatal. Myristicin is found in black pepper, carrots, celery, dill and parsnips. Nutmeg also has, as one study put it, “volatile oils” that contain myristicin.
The first documented case of someone buzzing on nutmeg comes from 1576 when an English woman took 10-12 nutmegs with the intent of getting high. Nutmeg has long been a substitute for other drugs, and there’s also a documented history of users experiencing brain damage or death.
Fortunately, nutmeg abuse isn’t common. Poison control for the state of Texas, for example, reported only 17 calls for nutmeg poisoning between 1998 and 2008. About 65 percent of these calls were due to intentional ingestion, and most of these users were adolescent males.
Five grams of nutmeg containing one to two milligrams of myristicin content is the minimum dosage needed to elicit hallucinations. Nutmeg, however, should not be a contender for the next TikTok challenge. People under the influence have reported a miserable experience. Instead of euphoria and hallucinations, people have described feeling severely anxious. They may even experience a sense of dread and terrible hallucinations that make “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo seem like a mild fever dream.
Another reason to avoid an overdose — there is no clinical data to help clinicians provide treatment. They can only address symptoms, like nausea and vomiting, which can last for an agonizing 72 hours.
URUSHIOL
For some people, mangos need a warning label. Mango skin, as well as the tree leaves and bark, contain urushiol, a toxin that can cause contact dermatitis. Urushiol is also found in poison oak and poison ivy.
In one case study, a patient presented in the ER after touching and eating mangos two days earlier. The patient had a history of irritation from poison ivy, which helped the physicians identify the urushiol as the culprit. The man had an intense rash on “all extremities,” and only his palms, soles of his feet, and lips were spared. Treatment was antihistamines and steroids and he recovered in several days.
The urushiol in mangos can also cause an allergic reaction when consumed. Depending on a person’s sensitivity, one bite can cause anaphylaxis or pulmonary edema. Urushiol is also found in raw cashews, which is why these nuts are steamed prior to sale. 
LECTINS
Lectins are a defense mechanism for plants because they are very hard for humans to digest. They are seen in a variety of foods including beans, carrots, cherries, corn, garlic, lentils, peanuts, peas, potatoes and soybeans.
Lectins are proteins that bind to carbohydrates. If foods like beans are soaked and then heated thoroughly, the lectin content lessens and the food is safe to eat. Red kidney beans have a high lectin content, and eating a raw handful can lead to a painful reaction. People have reported experiencing nausea, gas, bloating, vomiting and diarrhea. 
CYANIDE
Cyanogenic glycosides are a plant’s way of protecting itself from predators, and there are more than 2,600 species of plants that contain cyanide, a deadly poison.
Cyanide is found in many foods kept in pantries and fridges, including almonds, apple seeds, apricot pits, bamboo shoots, cherry pits and lima beans. All of these items, however, have low quantities of cyanide, and a person would intentionally have to eat significant amounts to feel the effects. For apples, a person would have to pick out 200 seeds from the core and then ingest them, which is the equivalent of eating 40 cores in one sitting.
Apple juice is also safe for people to drink. One study tested the cyanide content of more than a dozen apple juice brands and found the levels were so low they were not a health hazard. The study’s authors, however, recommended that people pressing apples to make juice remove the seeds just to be on the safe side.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/4-common-toxins-found-in-everyday-foods
Oriana:
My main experience has been with lectins. I whole-heartedly agree that minimizing them is to be recommended. How do you get rid of lectins? Pressure cook whatever food items lend themselves to pressure cooking (canned beans are already pressure-cooked during processing). When it comes to other kinds of food, use moist heat whenever you can. Steaming qualifies.
I repeat: canned beans are safe, since they have already been pressure-cooked.
One unexpected source of lectins: quinoa. Pressure cook it to make sure it won't harm your digestive tract. (Instant Pot has really changed my life and benefited my health. I use it every day.)
As for fruit, peel it. There are other ways to get fiber.
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ending on beauty:
The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean.
A Traveling Flake of Snow
Across a Barn or through a Rut
Debates if it will go —
A Narrow Wind complains all Day
How some one treated him
Nature, like Us, is sometimes caught
Without her Diadem.
~ Emily Dickinson
(Oriana: I'll take low clouds over relentless sunshine any time)
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