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The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder By: Peter Zeihan
The Good Soldier Švejk By: Jaroslav Hasek
The Diaries of Adam and Eve By: Mark Twain
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism By: Robin DiAngelo
Guns of August By: Barbara W. Tuchman
Euripides III: Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion (The Complete Greek Tragedies) By: Euripides
Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS By: Christopher Kimball Bigelow
The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories By: Don Bradley
Over the last few months I’ve taken the opportunity to put a little bit of personal news into the beginning of my monthly book review round-ups. But of course what’s been happening to me personally is completely overshadowed by what’s been happening in the wider world. The biggest event being the killing of George Floyd of course. I said quite a bit about this in my last post, which amounted to, “This is a really complicated situation.” With that in mind I don’t think I’ll try to do any simplification in this space
I will say that I was very surprised by what happened at the beginning of the week in Provo. For those that don’t know, Provo is the home of BYU and often considered to be one of the most conservative towns in America. Accordingly I was a little surprised to discover that protests were even a thing there, more surprised to find out that they were still happening, still more surprised to find out that the protestors were numerous and aggressive enough to be blocking traffic, and outright flabbergasted to discover that while one of these cars was being blocked from moving, someone walked up and shot the driver!
Fortunately it looks like the driver is going to be okay, but in order to get out of there he had to push through the protesters with his car and some who didn’t get out of the way were knocked aside. Honestly I think I would have behaved very similarly if protestors were blocking my car and then someone shot me. Particularly given that the gunman ran after the car and fired a second shot! (I mean what was this guy thinking?!?)
Of course, as you might imagine there was a lot of focus on the driver knocking people down, with much of the early focus on protestors who had been knocked down, and interviews where they emphasized that this was a peaceful protest. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you’re blocking an intersection and banging on cars, that on the continuum between Gandhi and riot that you might be closer to the riot end of the spectrum
Beyond that I’d like to wish everyone a happy Independence Day. Apparently national pride has fallen to a record low. I know some people would suggest that this is a positive development, but I’m pretty sure it’s not.
I- Eschatological Review
By: Peter Zeihan
384 Pages
General Thoughts
This book was recommended to me by one of my readers, and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. So much fascinating discussion of geopolitical trends, the strengths and weaknesses of every country, predictions for the future, etc. It really felt like a peek behind the curtains of power, into the deep underbelly where the true engine of the world creaks away.
In another sense the book is similar to Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, but with both a more narrow and more recent focus. Zeihan’s primary focus is geography, which permeates the discussion and informs everything from why Iran is so belligerent (mountainous agriculture leads to feast-famine cycles of aggression) to predictions about what will happen with China (the geography naturally splits the country in three sections, which will become increasingly difficult to hold together).
I made so many notes about this book, and marked so many pages that it’s difficult to know how to summarize it or what points to emphasis. But I’ll give it a shot:
The post World War II era represents an incredibly unusual period where normal geopolitics was suspended under American hegemony. This hegemony largely relieved countries from the need to focus on military and security concerns and allowed them to turn the attention to economic expansion. It was the perfect time for it because the Americans also decided to enforce free trade. This era is coming to an end because the US doesn’t need the rest of the world, in large part because of shale (though 3d printing factors in as well) and underlying all of it, the US has the best geography in the world.
After establishing this premise, the rest of the book examines the challenges the rest of the world will face as the US withdraws from things, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been more engaged by a book and its conclusions.
That said, even if the conclusions were engaging that doesn’t mean some of them weren’t inaccurate. I’ll get to my two major complaints in the next section, but for now let’s just focus on the critical place shale holds in Zeihan’s predictions. I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that American shale and the energy it provides is one of the top three components of the world Zeihan predicts. He devotes a whole chapter to it in the book (out of 15). And while in general it’s a very solid and compelling argument, it might entirely fall apart if oil ends up being cheaper than he expected. I’m not an expert on shale, but as far as I can, oil has to be north of $50/barrel in order for shale to be cost effective. As I write this it’s closer to $40, with it being as low as $20 earlier in the year. The point of all this is not to falsify Zeihan’s theory, but to point out that even in the near term, fairly safe predictions like: “the price of oil is going to keep going up” turn out to be subject to unexpected events. Which might point to the overarching weakness of Zeihan’s book. It doesn’t pay enough attention to Black Swans, which brings me to the next section.
What This Book Says About Eschatology
In addition to his assumptions about shale oil, where Zeihan could be wrong, but should that be the case, the consequences are low, there are at least two other areas where I think he might be wrong with far more severe consequences.
First in predicting American preeminence (which is right there in the title) he seems to be imagining that America will remain a unified, well-functioning state. One that intelligently pursues its global interests and acts as a single entity when it comes to foreign policy. For example when he predicts that the US will absorb Alberta, he points out how entirely sensible such a course is. And indeed from a realpolitik standpoint, it seems obvious. The kind of thing where if Kissinger were on one side and Bismarck on the other, the outcome would be a foregone conclusion. But the US is unlikely to be led by anything resembling these two individuals, and in fact it appears increasingly unlikely that the US will be “led” by much of anyone in the coming years.
In other words, when one sees how big the partisan divide is on something like masks, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be similar turmoil on something as big as annexing parts of Canada. Accordingly, before I’m ready to agree with Zeihan that the US will deftly seize the entire world in the coming decade, I’d like to see some evidence of it deftly seizing anything at all, and at the moment, such evidence is scarce. For America to be preeminent it first has to persist.
Second, while one can imagine the transfer of Alberta happening peacefully, other territorial changes Zeihan imagine seem much less likely to happen without war being declared, and from there it’s not difficult to imagine that a nation in decline might decide to use their nuclear arsenal rather than go down without a fight. As an example of what I mean consider this selection from the book:
[Japan’s] first military target is likely to be Russia’s Sakhalin Island. It is just off the coast of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, putting it well within Japan’s naval and air force power projection range. It’s infrastructure was largely built by Japanese firms, that infrastructure terminates on the island’s southern tip, the Japanese have the technical skill to keep all of Sakhalin’s offshore energy production running, the Russians do not, and Japanese nationalists still fume that the Russians seized it from Japan in the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Securing Sakhalin would place just under 300,000 bpd of crude production and 3 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production into Japan’s output column. Seizing Sakhalin will also permanently sever any chance of having positive relations with Moscow, but to be blunt, Moscow is five thousand miles away, so the consequences of breaking that relationship aren’t very high.
Wait… what? The consequences for pissing off Moscow aren’t very high?! As I said I loved this book, but Zeihan has either completely ruled out the use of nukes, which is something he never even mentions, let alone explains. Or he has a major blind spot on that issue. Certainly no reference to nuclear weapons appears in the index. He does have two more recent books, including one released just this year, so maybe he has since rectified this blind spot. And I enjoyed this book enough that I definitely intend to read his other books eventually, so we’ll find out. But beyond all that you can hopefully see what I mean. He offers up a very compelling argument based on proximity, infrastructure, history, and most of all geography for things to go a certain way. And if Russia was led by Henry Kissinger perhaps that’s exactly the way it would go. But as you may have noticed Putain is no Kissinger (though he comes closer than many of today’s leaders) and it’s hard to imagine him just rolling over if Japan tried to seize Russian territory by force.
Perhaps another way of describing the disconnect is that Zeihan looks at the world with piercing and refreshing sanity, but the world itself just continues to get more insane.
II- Capsule Reviews
By: Jaroslav Hasek
752 Pages
This book is what Catch-22 would have been if it was written about Czechoslovakian conscripts during World War I rather than American bomber pilots during World War II. Indeed Joseph Heller said that he never would have written Catch-22 if he hadn’t read this novel first. And I swear to you I came up with that comparison before I knew this fact.
Saying that it’s the World War I Czechoslovakian Catch-22 may not give an entirely accurate portrait of the novel, but it’s the best short description I could come up with. There are also bits that remind me of Vonnegut, with maybe even smaller bits of Douglas Adams tossed in there as well. Beyond that it fits into the genre of literature, where a seemingly foolish individual ends up being the wisest character of all. And you can never tell whether these “fools” are feigning ignorance or if they’re genuinely foolish, but perhaps wise because of that rather than in spite of it. I can’t pin down a name for this genre, but it made me think of medieval jesters or maybe Sancho Panza from Don Quixote.
On top of that, it’s very discursive. The main plot is quite short, but Švejk is constantly relating some story about a villager of his acquaintance the situation reminds him of. And every time a minor character is introduced they get a whole sub-story as well. Which reminded me a little bit of Canterbury Tales or The Book of the New Sun or the stories Woody would tell on Cheers. And once again I have no idea what this genre of literature is called. (You would think that if I got nothing else out of my English degree I would at least have a better grasp of the various genres, but no…)
Beyond that, according to Wikipedia, in addition to being the greatest Czechoslovakian novel of all time (or at least the most translated), it has credible claim to being the very first anti-war novel as well.
Having laid out this menagerie of qualities, you may still be unsure, whether you should read it. To that I would say, if you don’t find yourself in the position of Rene Zwellenger in Jerry McQuire, “You had me at ‘World War I Czechoslovakian Catch-22’”, then you probably shouldn’t. I enjoyed it, but I’m weird. Also having read the whole thing, I kind of think this is one of those cases where being a completist doesn’t add much. In fact Hasek didn’t finish the series, so rather than having a well defined plot and a dramatic ending, (though spoiler the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost.) Švejk just kind of peters out. As it’s largely a collection of vignettes, which end up being essentially equal in their satirical delightfulness, I would say that if you selected 50 pages at random you would probably get the majority of what the book has to offer, or at least a pretty good idea if you wanted to read 700 pages more of it.
By: Mark Twain
128 Pages
This very short book was funny, but not uproarious, it was well written, but not a classic, and it was witty but that wit often relied on somewhat antiquated stereotypes. But it’s just slightly over an hour on Audible, and it’s by freaking Mark Twain, one of the greatest American authors. How many mediocre podcasts have you listened to that clocked in at over an hour? Whatever else may be said this book will be better than that. Accordingly, you should listen to this book. It provides a decent glimpse into an America that is all too quickly being forgotten when it is not being actively attacked.
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
By: Robin DiAngelo
192 Pages
In my last post I already spoke quite a bit about this book, and in particular the paradox it presents. For those that didn’t get a chance to read the last post. DiAngelo makes the claim that racism is ubiquitous among white people, and when accused of it they invariably get defensive, which is understandable if racism is evil, but DiAngelo wants to get past a black and white understanding of the problem, to an understanding that the racism of white people is largely unconscious but if you can bring it up without them being defensive, you can make people less racist. Of course the problem is that everything else in the present moment is geared towards asserting that racism is awful and murderous. Nor does DiAngelo spend much effort refuting that, and seems to want to have it both ways.
Because of this and other issues I would say that the book was mediocre. It certainly has significant value as something of a manifesto for a certain philosophy of racism and how it works. But given, as I pointed out in the first paragraph, that it’s not even particularly vigorous in defense of that ideology, I’m not sure how valuable it is even towards that end. I will say that after reading this book I think I understand racism better from what might be called an HR perspective, but if you’re looking for insight into the problems of policing, this book is essentially valueless.
You may think I’m being unusually harsh, but there’s an argument to be made that I’m actually being kind. Matt Taibbi posted an absolutely savage review of the book just a few days ago. Sample quote:
When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have been put off by one of her Black female team members: “The white people,” she says, “were scared by Deborah’s hair.” (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction worker).
DiAngelo doesn’t grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, “I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics.” …(everyone should have such a person on speed-dial)
I include this section because I had basically the same reaction upon reading it. Nor is Taibbi the only person to dislike the book. David Brooks, who’s conservative, but of the most moderate type called the book, “the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.” And while the book itself has a 4.2 out of 5 star rating on Amazon the top seven(!) most helpful reviews are all one star.
This book is interesting as one snapshot of the current moment, but I can hardly imagine that it will be remembered at all 10 years from now.
510 Pages
If you were only going to read one history book ever, this might be it. I could fill up page after page with a discussion of this book. Tuchman does a truly unbelievable job of eloquently pulling together a whole host of people and events, using prose that strikes you again and again with it’s craft and eloquence.
Given that I could say a whole host of things about the book, but that the space I have is limited, what am I going to say? Upon reflection, I guess the most useful take away, for me, from the first month of World War I is how many incorrect assumptions governments, leaders and people had going into the war. Assumptions which were only proved incorrect in the unforgiving crucible of war and at the cost of millions of deaths. (See one of my previous posts for a discussion of war as the ultimate test of rationality.) What were some of those assumptions?
- The whole French plan assumed that the Germans couldn’t field nearly as many men as they actually did.
- The Germans assumed the Russians would take six weeks to deploy, they deployed in two.
- Everyone overestimated the Austro-hungarians
- French war doctrine before and during the initial stages of the war all revolved around going on the offense, and emphasized bravery and guts as the key components.
- The Germans thought the Belgians would just let the Germany army pass through their country without a fight.
- The French and British thought that the Belgian forts would hold out for months, they held out for days.
- The British entirely dismissed the importance of the Ottomans, and did nothing to keep them out of the war and several stupid things to bring them in.
As you can see, just a discussion of bad pre-war assumptions would take up quite a bit of space and the list above is far from complete. But after reviewing that list aren’t you struck with a profound need to know what incorrect assumptions we might be laboring under? And might the biggest one of all be that war between the great powers is a thing of the past?
By: Euripides
306 Pages
As I review more and more of these collections of Greek Tragedies, it starts to become harder to come up with things to say. But after saying in a previous post that “trust me, Odysseus was a jerk” one of my readers questioned first, whether he should trust me on anything, which is a fair point, and second whether Odysseus was actually a jerk or if I was applying 21st century morals to the situation. In response I offer up the following exchange between the herald of the Greeks (remember he’s on the same side as Odysseus) and Andromache.
TALTHYBIUS
O wife of Hector, once the bravest man in Troy,
do not hate me. This is the will of the Danaans and
the kings. I wish I did not have to give this message.
ANDROMACHE
What can this mean, this hint of hateful things to come?
TALTHYBIUS
The council has decreed that your son—how can I say this?
ANDROMACHE
That he shall serve some other master than I serve?
TALTHYBIUS
No man of the Achaea shall ever make this boy his slave
ANDROMACHE
Must he be left behind in Phrygia, all alone?
TALTHYBIUS
Worse; horrible. There is no easy way to tell it.
ANDROMACHE
I thank your courtesy—unless your news be really good.
TALTHYBIUS
They will kill your son. It is monstrous. Now you know the truth.
ANDROMACHE
Oh, this is worse than anything I heard before
TALTHYBIUS
Odysseus. He urged it before the Greeks, and got his way
ANDROMACHE
This is too much grief, and more than anyone could bear.
So don’t just take my word for it, It seems clear that even the ancient Greeks thought Odysseus went overboard with this act.
By: Christopher Kimball Bigelow
296 Pages
I should mention before I dive in, that this book showed up, unannounced, in the mail one day. There wasn’t even a note attached. Someone just decided to send it to me. I assume they wanted me to read and review it, but for future reference, if you’re going to do this, including a note might be nice.
Also, I debated whether to stick this review in the religious section or keep it in the main section. As a compromise I stuck it at the end of the main section. Because, while this book does have a lot of Mormonism in it, I don’t think that a deep knowledge of the religion is necessary to appreciate it. Particularly if you’re my age or a little bit older (as is the case with the author), and even more especially if you grew up in Utah in the 80s. Because even more than religion, this book is an autobiographical retelling steeped in that time and place. And on that metric I thought Bigelow did a fantastic job.
The book was strongly nostalgic for me, especially the first few pages, which were so evocative that I almost declared the book a masterpiece without reading any further. (In particular being reminded of the $3.35/hour minimum wage really took me back.)
Unfortunately for me and my desire to read a blow by blow retelling of my own youth, after the first couple of chapters Bigelow’s path diverges fairly strongly from my own (he jumped from new wave to punk, while I stayed with new wave). Despite this, the stories he tells are still very relatable. As I said, while the book has a fairly strong religious component, the story of someone making the transition into adulthood and not knowing what the heck they were doing, is pretty universal, and though Bigelow went a lot farther than I did in his search for meaning, I still think his stories of trying to figure things out can be appreciated by everyone.
Supposedly this is the first book in an autobiographical trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the next two.
III- Religious Review
The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories
By: Don Bradley
318 Pages
I know Don Bradley, not super well, but I’ve ended up in short conversations with him a half a dozen or so times, and once he was in the group I went to lunch with at the Mormon History Association. I mention this both because it probably impairs my objectivity, but also to just put out there that he’s a super nice guy and I couldn’t be happier that he’s been able to publish this book, which as I understand it represents something he’s been working on for many, many years.
With my prejudices noted, let me say I quite enjoyed this book, in addition to learning a lot. I don’t read as many LDS books as some people I know, but I don’t remember another book length treatment of this subject, and certainly if there was one I can’t imagine that it was nearly so comprehensive.
For those non-Mormons who may be reading this, I’ll try to briefly summarize the subject. After Joseph Smith had been translating the Book of Mormon for awhile, and had assembled a significant number of pages (116 as the story goes), Martin Harris, a gentleman who had been assisting him both as a scribe and with a significant amount of money, wanted to show these pages to his wife, who was not as excited about things as he was and kept demanding to see what he had been working on. Harris asked Joseph if he could show the translated pages to his wife, Joseph inquired of the Lord who said no. Harris persisted. Joseph asked again, and again the answer was no. Harris pleaded yet again, Joseph asked yet again, and finally the Lord said, yes. Or more likely some version of, “Fine, go ahead, but don’t be surprised if something bad happens.” And indeed something bad did happen. The pages went missing and have never been seen since. Joseph was instructed not to retranslate that section and since then they’ve been referred to as the lost 116 pages.
One of the first things Bradley points out is that given that the current Book of Mormon is 532 pages, you might imagine that if 116 pages went missing that this represents 18% of the intended volume. But he points out that this almost certainly understates the content that was lost. The figure of 116 is probably just an after the fact estimate which may have been derived from the fact that the section which replaced it happened to be 116 pages in the printer’s manuscript. At other times it was referred to as closer to 200 pages, and also, because of the larger size of the transcribed pages even if it was 116 it would have probably translated to more than that when it was printed.
Beyond that Bradley spends most of the book attempting to reconstruct what might have been on those pages from things that were said at the time. Either by Smith or Harris, or by people they talked to and who then subsequently recorded those conversations. The narrative he pieces together is excellent and painstaking work, and beyond that very interesting. None of what Bradley assembles comes completely out of left field, but I was very impressed by how much he was able to stitch together.
Of course in a reconstruction like this, you walk a fine line between making too many connections on the one hand or on the other, making too few, of being too conservative about filling in the gaps or too liberal. If it were me I might have erred on the side of being a little bit more conserative, but as I said it’s a difficult balance to strike, and if I was writing this review a month from now, maybe I’d say it was just right.
In any event for those who do read a lot of LDS books, or even those who only read a few, I can unhesitatingly recommend this book.
You know what else I can unhesitatingly recommend? The pot stickers at David’s Kitchen in South Salt Lake. Oh, and also I suppose donating to this blog, although if your excuse is that you need that money in order to buy the pot stickers, I’d be okay with that.
“Someone just decided to send it to me. I assume they wanted me to read and review it, but for future reference, if you’re going to do this, including a note might be nice. ”
But if I want you to try acid must I write a note?
The Lost 116 – But wouldn’t it simply be parts of the Book of Mormon? If those 116 pages are ever found and they match nothing in the Book of Mormon I imagine that would present a problem. Or is the Book of Mormon considered a partial translation of a larger manuscript with sections that were never translated but are presumably just as real? Sort of like how we know there are lost books of Homer and Aristotle.
Guns of August –
It does seem to me that we should account for the fact that this was the first great war of the modern age and they vastly overestimated the difference between a plan and a possible scenario. In terms of war gaming I would hope people at West Point and other military academies have moved the bar a bit . WWI is almost certainly underrated. The amount you read though is a bit intimidating….
Accidental Superpower- It sounds like he is assuming oil = power and will be that way going forward. Yet oil went negative after the pandemic, which got some attention at the time but I still think is an amazing thing that people haven’t appreciated. The Trump Administration even considered ‘buying oil’ from US producers but asking them ‘not to pump it out of the ground’.
Accelerate working from home.
Accelerate solar panels on houses.
Accelerate electric cars.
Oil gets weak. Add in some outliers like modular nuclear plants being mass produced in China and Inda or synthetic photosynthesis to pull carbon from the air and oil demand could collapse Saudi Arabia has an oil policy premised on the end of oil. Their logic is that as oil starts to die, they will be the cheapest producers of oil thereby driving those pesky US shale producers out of business. Granted they have a problem once it’s all done but for a half century it should work for them and if they spend the money wisely they might have another have century.
“First in predicting American preeminence (which is right there in the title) he seems to be imagining that America will remain a unified, well-functioning state.”
Remain or become a well-functioning state? Clearly this was written before the pandemic.
“Securing Sakhalin would place just under 300,000 bpd of crude production and 3 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production into Japan’s output column.”
But what does that actually do besides changing the columns around on a spreadsheet? If you want to ‘own oil production’ then just buy some shares of Texaco. Beyond that if the people of Sakhalin have Russian or Japanese passports, what does it matter for oil production? Oil will pump if the price is above its marginal cost or not if it is below.
I am unlikely to try acid at this point, though one of my disappointments about the book was I was hoping for a description of the connection between spirituality and tripping on LSD, ad in that sense it was kind of a disappointment
116 pages- Yes the Book of Mormon that exists is supposed to be part of a larger record, part of which was the source for the 116 pages.
I think you make a good point about WW1 being an inflection point in war making, but I think every modern war, the technology has increased so much that they’re all different. Also I’m glad you find the amount I read intimidating, that’s what I was going for. 😉
I’m with you on the centrality of oil, and the way in which negative oil prices have profound effects which most people haven’t grappled with. As far as the question about Sakhalin, one of the things about the book that I didn’t emphasis is that he predicts a withdrawal of the US where they will no longer guarantee the safety of global commerce, in which case having nearby supplies of oil you control becomes a lot more important.
LSD will probably soon become mainstream, I believe we already have a PTSD drug approved based on mushrooms. Although I think it will be mainstream in terms of treatment. The pseudo-religious atmosphere around it from the 60’s to 70’s probably won’t quite come back.
I’m not quite clear how is the US guaranteeing safety of commerce around the world? Safety from whom? Somali pirates? Is the idea that the seas will become dangerous so any country without its own oil will be at the mercy of others? Hmmm. If global commerce unsafe how about air travel? How could I fly to, say, New Zealand but New Zealand can’t get oil shipments? If this is his prediction it would imply some radical investment ideas in his 401K>
The idea of shipping stuff via the seas being relatively risk free only goes back as far as the British Empire. Which is not to say he’s not exaggerating, but historically safe seas have been the exception not the rule.
Insofar as he is accurate I suspect the true danger is fairly concentrated to the Persian Gulf. It wouldn’t take much to make that stretch of ocean dangerous, and if we assume that America has pulled out, who’s the obvious other person to keep it open? And how well disposed are they to Japan.
I don’t think air travel is in danger because nothing really valuable travels by air other than people…
But if Japan can’t get oil from the Middle East then the Sakhalin scenario seems a lot more plausible.
I’d say the inflection point for war was a little before WW1. Sure, automatic weapons made a huge difference, but they did so because the nature of war had already changed dramatically in a way most people were still figuring out. The difference was the shift from monarchical powers going to war into republican democracies going to war.
When France equipped the general populace the monarchs were terrified. They certainly couldn’t arm the peasantry, and the result was Napoleon defeating army after army they sent him and coming back for more. For Napoleon, sacrificing a division was a battle plan. For the monarchs, losing a division was the whole war.
When the US Civil War started people didn’t imagine it would be as bad as it became. But that’s because the sizes of armies – which was a function of the changed relationship of the people to their government – were both massive and sustainable with reinforcements over time.
Re Missing 114 pages…..
You know Mormonism will be 100% mainstream once it gets a Da Vinci Code treatment with a shadowy cabal of Mormon elders seeking to suppress the tiny sect that has been preserving the missing pages for generations because it contains earth shattering radical revelations and important corporate product placements. What might be revealed? Women priests? Same Sex Marriage ok’d? Endorsement of Starbucks coffee? We could write it, fortune and fame for both of us!
You may be right about the popularity of the book, but I’m not entirely sure it’s something the two of us could collaborate on…
On the Provo protest:
I’m not too familiar with the incident other than what you’ve noted here, but I would make a distinction between the mass of protesters and the one murderous gunman. Up until that person opened fire, the protesters were right in line with Gandhi’s way of doing things. Same with MLK’s formula (inspired by Gandhi). These guys didn’t just talk about change, they went out and led active protests. The point is to get in people’s way to make it impossible to ignore the complaint.
Should everyone just be able to go about their business when India is still a British colony and the mass of people are suffering under oppressive policies (not to mention the massacres)? Or when black people are treated as second-class citizens? Or when police departments are harassing people because of their skin color, not because of any actual or suspected crimes?
It’s obviously wrong to go around shooting people, and I imagine if I were in that car I’d be trying to get away in the same way this person did. Had they not pushed people out of the way, we’d probably be talking about a murder at a protest, which would almost certainly have propelled the protest to national prominence in a way that would have severely damaged the cause the protesters stood for. So I can’t fault the driver for their actions (in preserving their own life fleeing from an active shooter) even if they resulted in some bystanders getting hurt. The shooter is responsible for that, and public endangerment should be added to the charges against him.
As to the rest of the protesters, is there any evidence they were supporting this creep? Otherwise, I think it’s bad form to associate them with him.
I confess to not being especially familiar with the details of the MLK protests, but I read an entire book on Gandhi and I don’t recall any protests that involved detaining or blocking other people from traveling. As I recall they involved protesters not working, or refusing to pay taxes, or vast marches that may have coincidently inconvenienced people just because of their size, but weren’t designed with that end in mind. Can you point to a Gandhi or MLK led protest who’s specific aim was to block roads? It’s entirely possible that happened all the time and I’m unaware of it, but my impression was that this tactic wasn’t part of the non-violent playbook.
If you look at the video clearly there were not enough protesters in Provo to block the road just because of numbers, they were intentionally blocking the road, and in fact when the Expedition was trying to get past people ran over to get in front of it (also the light was green). None of which is to say that the driver should be absolved of all blame. More that I’m just not sure what the point is of blocking roads in a non-violent protest. I’m honestly curious, do they think that sort of thing increases support for their cause among the undecided?
I’d have to look up the details, but the various sit ins and other events staged by MKL et. al, obviously impeded normal functions of the targeted businesses and government buildings.
I’d say you’re right that they were often at least nominally about something else so they could claim the obstruction was just a by-product of the protest. (And maybe that’s one way they were better organized than the current movement.) But I’d be surprised if it weren’t at least an intended result of those protests. If it has been awhile, I recommend rereading Letter from Birmingham Jail, where MLK talks about how much people – both white and black – want correcting injustice to be a convenient process that happens when there time is right and when it’s not too much of a hassle. And how much that attitude is both galling and the greatest barrier to change.
Remember that people complained when the protests were not more inconvenient than players taking a knee during the national anthem. I think the feeling among protesters is that the wait-and-see approach hasn’t worked at all. People just ignore them and go about their business.
Think about that from the perspective of the shoe on the other foot. If you’re getting pulled over a dozen times a week, then get fired for being constantly tardy for work, you can’t exactly ‘go about your business’. So why should everyone else? Why does the public get to ignore a systemic problem forever? “It’s disruptive and inconvenient” seems a weak excuse.
I think the looting, violence, and rioting are a separate issue. When people start getting hurt it changes the conversation. But that brings me back to the real problem, to my mind, which is that all the protests have essentially been derailed because the only thing anyone can talk about is the rioting. Yet the peaceful protesters outnumber the violent rioters. There’s this subset that the rest of them get associated with to the detriment if the message.
This is where I’d be careful to condemn the shooter, but not so much the protesters. It’s inconvenient to get stopped at a light by a protest, I know. It happened to me before, years ago. I didn’t even agree with the message of that protest, such that the whole encounter was mildly annoying and took up a bunch of my time. I get it. But I’m not about to shut down this form of public display of grievances, even so.
I’m sure pervasive protests that make it impossible for anyone get anywhere would cross some kind of line. It maybe targeting a single individual constantly. I think the line is somewhere between there and blocking a single intersection for a one-off protest.
There is a difference between what someone is justified in doing and what it’s optimal for them to do. People are justified in being angry, but that doesn’t mean that their anger will bring about the best results. So my argument is less that it crosses some ethical line and more that it’s just less effective than doing it some other way.
To put it in more concrete terms, having a sit in at a government building until laws are changed, or something else with a direct and clear connection between the protest and what they’re protesting would seem more likely to to bring about the results they desire than blocking a busy intersection.
I have to look up more info on what exactly went down. It doesn’t help that in Charlottesville we had a white nationalist type purposefully plow into protesters trying to kill (and succeeding in killing one). Plus I’ve seen plenty of right wing memes along the lines of “If protesters try to shut a highway, run them over’.
This seems like a danger for a perfect storm where a motorist could be endangered by a few radical protesters but then starts plowing through a lot of them, the rest will take up the assumption the car is operating as an attacker thereby setting in motion a disaster.
Well just recently there was another example of this tactic going awry:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/shooters-wanted-death-girl-atlanta-71624881
Significant quote:
“Authorities said Secoriea was in the car with her mother and another adult when the driver tried to drive through illegally placed barricades to get to a parking lot in the area. Armed individuals blocking the entrance opened fire on the vehicle, striking it multiple times and killing the child, police said.”
I understand that two data points does not a trend make, but neither story makes me very eager to see this form of protesting become widespread.
Looked up some of the details. The intersection was in front of a police precinct. Seems like the right place to be for this protest.
Maybe the tactics aren’t optimal if you’re Vulcan, but in the sense of having a release valve for public anger maybe they aren’t such a bad thing.
If you want riots and looting, ignore the protests and make the story about the violence outstrip the message of the protesters who remain peaceful. I’d rather not convince them through sad experience that the only way they’ll be heard is if they employ violence.
I think there’s two dangers here. One is the danger of ascribing to the whole what the few do. It just takes one person to shoot. The other is trying to assume the most dramatic action speaks for anyone beyond the person that does it. I wouldn’t call the shootings a form of protest nor would I call riots and looting a protest either.
But it is a risk of protests (as it is concerts, sporting events, etc.). If you ever been to one there there is always something kind of ‘elemental’ about them. That plus they also attract the type that are into physical action, which is not the same, at all, as those of us who like to write on keyboards more. Kind of like sparks in dry woods, more protests more risk you take.
Only problem here is the protests are not going to go away. It’s a little bit like those who demanded we have to reopen to save the economy who are not discovering the economy doesn’t magically come back from premature reopening.
Exactly, the protests aren’t going away. What we all need is for a modern MLK-like figure to rise and inspire the protests while directing their actions toward productive means. Violence won’t win for the cause, but sustained peaceful protests are much more likely to get a significant response. When have we seen something like this before, where strong leadership is severely lacking but nobody steps forward? Is it just a feature of movements formed by social media?
The headless nature of things has been much remarked upon, and it makes things a lot more complicated. One thing I’m wondering about is, why did people need a leader back then? I assume it was a coordination issue, and that with social media that issue has been solved in a distributed fashion. But this just means that the getting things started coordination issue has been solved, doesn’t it make the decide on a solution, and wind things down once a solution has been reached coordination problems a lot more difficult?
Seems like hitting protesters with cars is a thing, including cops who’ve been put on leave for circulating memes advocating it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/bloomington-car-attack-protesters.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
Okay so we have on person killed by a car, and one 8 year old girl shot in a car. Plus some people injured by cars and some people injured by shots fired into cars. We can try and decide which is worse, and it is interesting to note that the in seattle where the person died the car was being driven by a black gentleman, and the 8 year old girl was also black, but I don’t think that’s what we should be doing. As I said in one of my very earliest posts:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2017/01/28/godzilla-trudges-back-and-forth/
You imagine that when civil discord happens that the righteous side will rise up, and people will rise up with them and you’ll triumph in a glorious sweep of justice, but that’s not how it works. How it works is you get tit for tat violence which escalates, there are no winners and eventually it’s just like Godzilla trudging through your city. He doesn’t just step on the wicked he steps on random people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And eventually you don’t end up with a new utopia, you end up with a Godzilla trudging zone.