The House of David

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Catharsis

Ah that felt better.

For a New Year's resolution, I resolve to post more and rant less. (And explode as the paradox takes effect...)

posted by Zimri on 20:39 | link |

Public-squaring a circle

I cannot abide unethical use of language. And here is one that always bothers me: "public", and its clichéd extension "public square", to refer to extensions of federal government.

Did the Reagan Revolution teach you @#$%s nothing? "PUBLIC". DOES. NOT. MEAN. "GOVERNMENT". When a demagogue elides the two, that's when I reach for my revolver.

(The primal scream above was a paraphrase of Meg Wallace in A Wrinkle in Time, "equal does not mean alike". Good anti-totalitarian message by the way.)

P.S. and UPDATE 10/22/2009. "Public square" and "public option". Hoist. Petard.

Labels: secularism

posted by Zimri on 20:10 | link |

Why the Ten Commandments?

The Ten Commandments weren't the foundation of Western codes of law. If anything, the pre-existence and primacy of these codes led to acceptance of the Ten Commandments, not the other way around. So why is it so popular to paste them around courthouses of states, none of which states sport an established religion?

It seems obvious to me. The yokels choose the Ten Commandments over the other law code soundbytes just to assert that, by contrast with those pagansecularhumanistwickeddecadentungodlyimmoral Greeks and Romans, we Americans are based on the Bible (halleluia!).

A Ten Commandments display is just a pointer to what lies around it: the Hebrew Torah. It tells us heathens two things. First, that this is a Christian nation which refuses to acknowledge any other forebears other than the Jews (who are just getting used here anyway, and most Jews know this). Second, that the best law is theocratic: delivered from on high to the chosen prophet, and telling us that we wretches are here to serve God first, and to protect our fellow man second except where this conflicts with the first four Divine Commandments.

Of course a Ten Commandments display in a secular courthouse represents an establishment of religion. It belongs there just as much as all those Qur'anic verses about killing unbelievers belong there. Which is to say, not at all, and it is a wicked confidence trick to pretend it does.

posted by Zimri on 19:54 | link |

The basis for Western codes of law

The Qur'an uses as its moral basis, in part, a section in the Surah of the Sons of Israel, 17:22-39 if memory serves, which its bracketing verses label "the Wisdom". This in turn is a revision of the Ten Commandments as written in the Book of Deuteronomy in the Torah. That, literary critics tell us, could be based on similar commandments in the Book of Exodus. There is yet another version in Leviticus.

But all of these Jewish and Arabic Books of Law derive from a Near Eastern tradition of lawgiving which, claimed its Near Eastern authors, derived from the gods. And it wasn't just the Jews and Arabs who were People of the Book when it came to legal ethics. The same held true of the Greeks and Romans, and while they were pagan too.

No serious scholar would claim that the Greek lawgivers Lycurgus and Draco in Sparta and Athens (respectively) derived their written codes from the Jews, much less the Hijazi Arabs. If you could have asked these Greeks, their response may well have been "what in Hades are Jews?!" The Romans, too, had their Twelve Tables code, which (Livy tells us) was written in an ancient Italic precursor to Latin which few could still read as of Caesar's day. This code in turn was likely derived from Greek and Etruscan precursors, with a dash of Phoenicia.

These sixth-century BC Mediterranean codes could have been a corruption of Deuteronomy (probable date of authorship: mid 600s BC). But this is unlikely, given that nothing of Deuteronomy survives in any of them.

I accept that the Roman Empire and its successor states did adopt the Bible, and its Ten Commandments in particular, as a basis for its codes of law. I am thinking here of the Theodosian, Visigothic, and Justinianic codes. However, the history of it all leaves us with two choices. Either the Ten Commandments influenced pagan Greek and Roman law; or else the Greeks and Romans, having become Christian and having accepted the Jewish Torah, already had a tradition of legal code and discovered that the Jews also had one and accepted it from there.

That last is most likely. It turns out there is a long literature in Christian apologetic which claims that pagan practice was a Praeparatio Evangelica - that is, a run-up to the Gospel. Eusebius wrote just one example of the genre. Much of it was preserved by the early Church and all of it is bogus.

Claims that our system of law is based on the Ten Commandments are, therefore, naught but Christian apologetic, however long its pedigree. Our system of law was not based on the Old Testament. It was instead based on Near Eastern legal ethics, from which the Ten Commandments were a parallel, not preparatory, development.

And yeah, it upsets me when I see such arguments dragged out in the present day. We should know better and, I strongly suspect, most 10C proponents do know better but pretend otherwise. The Ten Commandments have no place in a secular court, unless bracketed by pagan Greek and Roman parallels.

I have a theory as to why it is so important for some elements to post them anyway, but this is outside the scope of this post.

posted by Zimri on 19:18 | link |

Writing vs. ranting

Normally I'd say that I couldn't identify with PJ O'Rourke and Stephen R Donaldson. Both are highly talented writers, at least by marketplace standards (and as a libertarian / conservative, I'm not about to argue with those standards). But I can identify with one obstacle they come across: that it isn't easy to write.

One of Ace-Of-Spades's many fans emailed me: that I should turn this thing into a real blog, with regularly-updated posts and some decent formatting. If I were a fan of my own work, I'd say the same thing; except possibly with more curse words and with the phrase "real blog", which this emailer kindly didn't.

I find it a lot easier to post on someone else's comment board. Although, when I do that, it comes off like a hotheaded rant.

It is cathartic to blow off steam. Still, I do feel a little bit bad about using someone else's forum to do it in. As a point of ethics, if nothing else, I should do the bulk of my ranting here on my own forum. It's not like I even have comments.

That Klueless Klutz Klander up in Canada had a tendency to get his rant on too, of course, and now he's infamous. Part of the reason I use other forums for my extra-special rants is exactly because it's so dangerous to let out what I'm really thinking. I'd like to imagine that I'm not quite that venomous but, yanno, who knows unless one's been pushed to it. I do know, and regret, that I am no pure soul.

The above wasn't that hard to write, actually. But then, it was more of a rant than an argument. And so it goes...

posted by Zimri on 18:53 | link |

Friday, December 23, 2005

Misunderstanding the Fall of Rome

The Night Attila Died turns out to have a ten-page aside on Gaiseric (also spelt Gaeseric). In it, Babcock describes "the last gasp of the Western Empire" as the later expedition of the 460s CE, not the former one (pp. 182-3).

He calls Anthemius, Leo's man in Rome, as "an ally in the West". But this is vague. Was he a native Westerner like Stilicho, or an ally from back East? In context, we're supposed to think of Anthemius as a Westerner - but Heather makes clear that he wasn't.

He also calls Marcellinus's navy "the Western navy", but doesn't say anything about Marcellinus. He was, in fact, an Illyrian. By then, Illyria had become Balkan / Byzantine in focus (although still pan-Roman in ideal). The future emperor Justin I, and the famous Justinian I, were Illyrian.

There is no reason to posit that Leo's expedition was a Western Empire anything, even a "gasp". I will grant this was only an aside in Babcock's thesis, and that Heather made the same missteps (although at least the latter gave us the tools to figure it out). However I think that this expedition deserves better understanding; not as the West's last gasp but as the East's first.

posted by Zimri on 14:16 | link |

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The Mind of Ahmad Nejad

In light of the President of Iran's latest move - banning Hotel California - I'd like to dedicate this post to him.

Beforehand, thanks to Ace for introducing me to His Lunacy's latest flight of fancy. So without further ado -

In a dark desert dungeon
In an undisclosed lair
I was smokin' Satanic Verses
And let Khamanei share.
Then an aura surrounded me
In a shimmering light...
I started gasping, and Ayatollah tol' me
That I was high as a kite.
Water backed up though the toilet;
I remembered the mullahs tell
That the Imam Mahdi
Could be coming like that out that well.
Then I sensed like a vision
('Long with leprechauns, and Fay Wray)
That were voices down in my drainpipe
I thought I heard them say...

Welcome to the Mind of Ahmad Nejad
all that empty space... i bet he must free-base.
What a damn loon, that Ahmad Nejad
Tryin' to bring us, here; into the Yawm Akhir.

Now I'm ridin' the Prophet's horsie
To where the universe ends
Thinkin' of all those wacky boys
That I call friends
How they rant in the majlis
On sweet purple qat;
Some of 'em call me the Mahdi
But others call me a twat.
So I called up a mullah
Please show me a sign
He said...
Bitch, you're wound tight like a rusted ball of twine
And still I hear voices, from that girl that Haji Rezayy
Strung up back in Neka
Still I hear her say

I won't be missin' that Ahmad Nejad
I wish I had my mace, I'd spray it in his face
So this is the way of Ahmad Nejad
Another woman dies, to cover up his lies

Scratchin' all my chin hairs
With my beard fulla lice
And I'm glad,
They're all just prisoners here
Of Khomenei's device
And in my palace chambers
We all gather for a feast
Got kickbacks from those smugglers
From Afghan land on our east.
The Holocaust didn't happen
Those damn Joooz make me snore
Anyway... we'll get the bomb soon and bomb their ass back to 634
So I'll sit here in Tehran
I'll get high, kill and thieve
Tell the world the craziest shit y'all ever heard
But ya better believe
Because...

Welcome to the world of Ahmad Nejad
the biggest mental case in the human race.
I've had enough of that Ahmad Nejad
When his ass is gone, candy for everyone!

posted by Zimri on 02:13 | link |

Monday, December 19, 2005

Snort

Through Brendan Loy, another storm to watch out for: Evo Morales is going to become President of Bolivia. It didn't make the major news networks, as far as I know, but it is important.

Everyone saw this coming, given that Bolivia is a democracy and that it wasn't planning on putting a stop to that. Most Bolivians are natives - Quechua and Aymara, if memory serves - and the vast majority of them can't stand the Spanish-speaking and globalised elites who were running the place up to now.

In that divided nation, Morales is in effect the Inca [king of the Quechua] of the mountain regions. The non-Indian and mestizo people in the southeastern lowlands voted for the other guy.

This could mean secession - but the seceding provinces could only go to Brasil (which speaks Portugues) or Argentina (with its own brand of weird Leftism). Otherwise, they're landlocked like Paraguay, and when's the last time you heard of Paraguay in the news?

The only upside is that, maybe, this result will spur the US to abandon its "drug war". I can't stand the coca weed and I'd shed nary a tear if it were gone from this earth. But, it's here, and it's as part of Andean culture as tea is to British. (Granted, it's a large reason why it was the Kings of England and not the Incas of Peru who conquered the world.) Plus it's just losers who use it, so why stop them? Americans who whine about how their children need to be protected don't deserve to breed anyway.

If the US disagrees with my opinion, then I suggest that it provide better alternatives. Like legalising marijuana, or at least letting states legalise it. I'm not one of those bitching about Nyquil's new formula, and I'm not going to say anything about what I may or may not have done in the past. I'm just saying that a little weed goes a long way.

posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link |

When to use torture

I had been avoiding the great torture debate, except to mention at its outset that I'm against prisoner abuse and that I was really upset when I heard that we weren't preventing our troops from abusing prisoners.

Since then, I've gathered two points: torture works well at brainwashing and torture cannot gather intelligence. I've also decided not to bother with Talmudic distinctions between torture and "coercive interrogation techniques". I'll just use "torture" as a shorthand for all of the stuff we'd like to do to people we don't like, and say that I'm for it if it works. If that makes you like me a little less, then I can live with that.

We could - and should - use torture to over-rule the mental patterns of convicted terrorists. Such creatures are not just criminals, but war criminals, and have already earned the death penalty. If the torture were focused by a professional (think, Clockwork Orange), then I'd have no problem subjecting the terrorist to it. The aim would be to convert him into a person who did not anymore believe that God was urging bloodshed against unbelievers. If it's impossible to do this while keeping him Muslim, as I suspect it is, then he should be converted into a Jew.

Against non-terrorists, or strongly-suspected terrorists who have not been convicted - don't torture them. Don't even look at them crosseyed. Put them in a cozy-ish jail, treat them well, and give them staff psychologists to help them talk. If they are good people, their consciences will prompt them to tell what they know. If they are bad people - well, much as I'd like to raise the likes of Paul Cella up on a cross for a few hours, simple civility demands that we let them go if they've been exonerated for the crime of which they've been accused. They'll screw up eventually.

It wasn't Sullivan's anti-torture postings that shifted me to the anti-Sully camp; his support for Kerry, his support for gay marriage as equal to straight marriage, and his attacks on the present Pope did all that. And it's not McCain's anti-torture statements that make me anti-McCain; it was McCain-Feingold and, uh, McCain-Feingold. But all the above did made it hard to support Sully and McCain when they were, at base, right; and I think that's where Glenn Reynolds is coming from.

posted by Zimri on 19:12 | link |

Racism and anti-semitism

David Goldenberg's The Curse of Ham is a fascinating study of the Christian and Islamic religions' shared theological justification behind the enslavement of Blacks.

It turns out that Judaism was pro-Black where Jewish sources mentioned the Kushites (c.f. Aubin's Rescue of Jerusalem) and so was original Christianity. It was the Muslims of southern Iraq who came up with the counter-theory: that when Ham sinned against his father Noah, Ham's descendents were doomed to slavery. (The Jewish Bible dooms only Canaan, leaving Ham's other descendents alone.)

The Muslims of Iraq, south of Kufa, were Arab tribes - particularly the Tamim - who traced their descent from Ishmael. The Basran Arabs were proud of their Ishmaelite heritage and of their history in conquering new lands for Allah. In southern Iraq, the locals required some way of explaining the plantation racket they were running in their sugar cane fields. They found one: not quite in the Qur'an, although it did bolster their xenophobia, chauvinism, and ignorance; but in what they still respected as the "Tawrat" - Genesis.

Xenophobia and chauvinism had always existed, as had ignorance. The Greeks thought that black peoples had gotten that way from being carbonised by the sun. The Egyptians thought of Syrians (including Israel) as treacherous and violent. The Romans viewed Huns basically as Tolkien viewed Orcs. But never before had a people classified an entire genomic branch of the human race as having been created for slavery, and traced that to an origin myth. The Basrans invented the world's first racism, as modern readers would define it.

And Sayf ibn 'Umar shows that the Basrans had also come up with the first anti-Semitism, as modern readers would define it.

It's easy enough to explain Basra's racism - they had to do it - but not so easy to define its anti-Semitism.

A Black Studies major could provide a real service by writing a thesis on the conjunction between Basran-racism and anti-Semitism. If s/he dares to...

posted by Zimri on 18:43 | link |

Taking away the car-keys to Avalon

While I'm on a "Fall of the Roman Empire" kick I figured I'd go after the "so-called Arthur King" legend next.

Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd wrote a book on the topic, Keys to Avalon, which proposed to subject the Arthur legend to philology. In this is it much like Babcock's plunge through Germanic legend and Byzantine redaction criticism in Attila. At the end of their book, Blake and Lloyd say that the Arthur legend, or rather the overarching Pendragon saga from Vortigern to Mordred, ought to be restricted to the Saxon border portions of pre-Offa North Wales.

They have made a number of assumptions which most "Grail hunters" have already made. They assume that the Celtic warlordism which plagued Welsh mediaeval history was a constant of British history going back to the pre-Roman era. From that, they extrapolate that Arthur's history ought to be considered in the context of such warlordism. That would further restrict Arthur's kingdom geographically - somewhere. So grail hunters should look for a nucleus of Arthurian sites, not individual sites scattered around all Britain from head to foot.

They also point out that Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the 12th century CE, was responsible for popularising the Arthur myth to a wider (read, Latin-speaking) audience. Monmouth claimed to have translated the book from "British" which in context meant "Welsh". It turns out that there were periods of pre-Stuart English history when claimants to the throne would emphasise native Celtic British ties over English. One such time was the Tudor period, when the king promised a "King Arthur II" after him - although that one unfortunately died while still in his Prince phase. But another such time was Geoffrey's: the heir Mathilda received her support from the Welsh frontier while the usurper Stephen was ruling from London and Normandy. During such pro-Welsh periods of British history, the authors claim, the Brittano-Saxon nationalists stretched the Arthurian legend to cover all Britain. Blake and Lloyd prefer local Celtic poetry to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

(As an aside, Arthur stories were far more popular in Wales, the Midlands, and the Continent than they ever were in the English heartland. This legend cycle posed intrinsic problems for the English which the national epics of Greece, Rome, Araby, and Judaea never did for their people. This is one reason Tolkien wrote his own myth-cycle, the Silmarillion: it is an alternative more friendly to the Saxon peoples. Besides, the Finns had cooked up a new epic of their own not long before Tolkien with their Kalevala.)

Geoffrey of Monmouth said that Vortigern invited the "Saxons" from "Germania" to settle in "Britain", and it was not just he who said it but also contemporary post-1066 Welsh and English chroniclers. Nowadays we assume that Vortigern was in charge of what is Britain now, and invited Saxons from what is Germany now. Blake and Lloyd, though, think that we should read this with the eyes of an early mediaeval Welshman. From this perspective, "Britain" is Wales (and Cornwall, Rheged, and Strathclyde); and "Germany" is the Saxon-speaking part of what was already starting to become England. Think of Geoffrey's "Germany" like we think of our France and Burgundy: they represent where the Franks and Burgundians ended up as of 500 AD, not where they came from.

That means the authors must posit a period of silent Saxon takeover of England east of the Severn, perhaps dating as far back as the late 300s AD. In that case, trueblooded Englishmen of Essex and Sussex (say) cannot point to Hengist, Horsa, and Vortigern for their origin myths. It was other Saxons who begat them. (Personally, I'm mostly of Staffordshire stock, so the Vortigern / Hengist legend still works well enough for me.)

Since the Arthurian legends refer to Saxon kingdoms north of "the Hwmyr", by a "wall", the authors propose that there was a third Roman wall separating the more Romanised portions of Britannia from the hillmen of Wales. This third wall was running through Roman territory and so was only meant to slow movement, rather than to stop it altogether as in Scotland. Therefore the authors propose an earthwork of Emperor Severus, following the track of that Wales-spanning dyke attributed to King Offa of Mercia. They further suggest that for a few centuries it went by the name "Ossa's dyke", after a Saxon king who settled there in the 400s CE. A combination of misprints ("Ossa" is spelled "Offa" in ancient texts and printed "Ofsa" in early printed manuscripts), mishearings, and - later - West Country chauvinism transplanted this to the King of Mercia. Therefore, so say our fearless authors: the Saxon kingdoms Deira and Bernica, alongside the wall, north of the Hwmyr, are not in the Northumbria of the late Middle Ages. They are instead north of the Hwmyr=Dee and alongside "Ossa's Dyke". (The river Dee would then have taken its name from the Roman city Deva, now Chester, which is fine by me; but then, they also claim that for the kingdom Deira, and for that the authors rely upon the reader's tolerance for place-name philology.)

Anyway, The Keys to Avalon wasn't taken as a serious work at the time; it didn't help that the authors worked for the North Wales tourist board. I can't find many reviews of the book, and I found several copies of the book in a used-book-store so it looks like I won't find very many more reviews. It also looks like not even Blake and Lloyd will stand by their 2002 book anymore. They wrote another one, Pendragon, which Ian Pegler has reviewed: it is apparently a good book but one which jettisons much of the authors' first foray into the field. The Keys to Avalon does at least manage to go without a picture of the Phaistos Disc on its cover.

Cattiness aside, the book's initial assumptions are far-reaching enough that they may even be falsifiable. For instance:

The Severan Wall - Is there a third-century Roman earthwork, did it really underlie Offa's Dyke, and when did it get Offa's name attached to it?
When is the first material evidence for Saxon settlements as far as, say, Wednesbury in Stafford? Is it before 450 CE (so before Vortigern) or after 535 CE (so after the Year Without A Sun and the plagues which followed Roman trade networks)?
All those placenames for Geoffrey of Monmouth: Were they ever placed in today's Kent and Northumbria before the Norman Conquest? or did the current placenames migrate eastward due to the influence of Arthurian romance among nationalistic and/or chivalric nobility?
If Cambria / Cymru at first referred to Venedotia / Gwynedd, how did the Romans refer to the region west of Severus's Wall / Offa's Dyke? When was "Cambria" extended beyond north Wales - and why?
Where are other Saxon records of their founders? Were Hengist and Horsa specific to the West Country or do references to them exist in Kent and East Anglia (say)?

If there was no Severan Wall, if the Midlands were full of Celts until the 600s, and if Cambria was always the Welsh name for what lay west of the Severn, then the book is bunk.

Personally, I expect to find that the Celts owned Bristol and the Severn basin until the mid-500s CE. I expect that the plague carried them off and let the Mercian English in. So: bunk. (But interesting.)

posted by Zimri on 18:10 | link |

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Grauniad writer can't read

Charles calls it. Anti-semitism, as a belief in the Jews' cosmic and inherent evil, is NOT the invention of the West.

Admittedly it's not the invention of the Qur'an, the Prophet, or the earliest Muslims either. The Qur'an is full of anti-Jewish statements, but it's not anti-Semitic. It can't be, given its reverence for Ishmael; but more importantly it respects Israel equally to Ishmael. The Qur'an's quarrel with Judaism is with those Jews who followed a practice of Israel as a commandment of God; the Jews could correct that much if they wished to. At that point the Jews would be on the level of the sons of Keturah, another set of non-Ishmaelite Arabs who are nonetheless sons of Abraham, and who count numerous influential groups among their numbers including Judhâm (who claim to be Midianites). The Qur'an, therefore, takes the same stance as that of the New Testament, and likely reflects a similar (ancient) split in a Jewish-leaning community.

However Sayf bin 'Umar the historian, or perhaps "historian", was writing anti-Semitic books as early as the 'Abbâsid period (late 8th century AD), and likely from sources dating to the Marwânids. So anti-Semitism did exist in Islam, at least in early 'Abbâsid Basra.

posted by Zimri on 17:27 | link |

What if Islam is the problem?

Here is a fascinating article, which claims that the Pentagon is studying Islam. It seems that they've gone neo-conservative on us: they are close to deciding that Osama bin Ladin is right.

That is, the second part of Osama's thesis is right. That is the part that says that Osama's Islam is the most correct interpretation of the version of Islam promulgated by Muhammad and the Caliph Umar. That leaves the first part of Osama's thesis, that Muhammad and Umar were correct about the ideal human society and how to get there. This is, unfortunately, the assumption of the majority of the world's Muslims: almost all Sunni, and also (deep down) most Shi'a.

This means that the rest of us must get into the business of holy war, which in this case means convincing Muslims that they must abandon Umar's way. It has the disadvantage that Umar's way has so far purged the Near East of non-Muslims, thereby working as it was designed to. It has the further disadvantage that the only nation in a position to take the lead on the deprogramming exercise is America.

And America really doesn't want to do it. There's a good proportion of Americans who would rather convert to Islam themselves than back the struggle against it.

The second half of the Superbowl began immediately after noon prayers.

posted by Zimri on 17:03 | link |

The Byzantine shift

Now I'm on page 438, in the midst of the conclusion. I'm in agreement with O'Donnell, this far: Peter Heather's book is really a "Fall of the Roman West", with nothing about the overlapping fall of Romanitas in the Coptic / Semitic East. But I'm still seeing 22 September 455 AD as the last real day of the Roman West.

It had long been clear to everybody that Rome lacked enough manpower and finances to reassert itself in the West. It was similarly clear that the easiest way to recover such resources would have been to recapture Carthage from the Vandals. What wasn't clear to the Romans was that Rome had no hope of doing this, at least not without the East and while Geiseric was leading the Vandals' defense.

To be fair, I've argued that this had held true some time before 455 AD. But with Aetius leading the armies of the West, this didn't have to be tested. If Valentinian III had decided upon an invasion of Vandal North Africa, and gotten Aetius on board, it is possible that the West could have pulled some support off Constantinople and led the invasion on Western terms. Following Aetius's death, this was no longer possible; it just took the West another painful decade to learn it.

Soon after Avitus's accession, Italy-based generals Majorian and Ricimer (to be played by Tony Robinson and Rowan Atkinson in the TV movie) hatched a cunning plan. They decided that Avitus was an obstacle to Roman revival and so they kicked him out of office. The two eventually (457 AD) agreed to elevate Majorian to the purple. By 461, Majorian had scraped together 300 ships and collected them at a port in Spain. Geiseric starved that force into rout by simple piracy against the armada's supply lines. Majorian paid for his folly with his crown and, five days later, with his life.

The Byzantine Emperor Leo, in 467 AD, then hatched a plan of his own. Leo sent over to Rome his rival for the Eastern throne Anthemius Junior. Most factions in the West, including Ricimer, accepted him as the Western "emperor", and began a new propaganda campaign for the recovery of Carthage. Leo managed to provide 1100 ships and to protect their supply lines. If Leo's forces had landed, they would have been more than enough to see Geiseric off; Justinian's forces in 532 AD would do this and more numbering only 500 ships.

Leo's strategy was arrogant: it assumed favourable winds and Vandal barbarism, and the Vandals tore it apart at sea. But even if Leo had succeeded, it still would not have counted as a Western revival. This was not a Roman mission but a Byzantine mission. Leo did not let any Westerners or even Anthemius in on the fun; instead Leo appointed his cousin, a certain Basiliscus. Leo further set an Illyrian in charge of Sardinia and an Egyptian in charge of Tripoli. It is likely that Leo had Basiliscus tapped to rule Carthage. It is unlikely that Leo would have let Anthemius rule the West as he saw fit.

What Leo expected of his failed North African adventure can be extrapolated from the fruits of Justinian's successful one. The wealth of Carthage would be expropriated not for Italy's interests, but for Constantinople's. Leo after all had a Persian border to bulk up, and a Danube frontier to repopulate (the Huns were active there even in the late 460s). Once the bill for the expedition and for homeland defence was paid, Leo would have had troops to spare in North Africa to follow up his conquests elsewhere. If Justinian's strategy is any guide, Leo would have tried for direct rule over southern Spain while Anthemius kept the peace in Italy.

It does not matter whether Anthemius would have continued to rule, or got assassinated by a Ricimer or an Odoacer. Rome in 470 AD would have ended up as it ended up anyway: a puppet state of somebody, bickered over between Byzantines and Goths, with nothing to offer its rivals but cession of territory. Before that fateful day in 455 AD, the West could have bartered with the East. After 455 AD, Constantinople was the Roman Empire.

(It's also possible that Leo, like Justinian after him, would have gotten drawn into a civil war in Italy. But if so, Leo had the advantage of superior numbers, greater historical memory, and decades to go before the Year Without A Sun and its attendant horrors in 535 AD.)

posted by Zimri on 11:01 | link |

Monday, December 12, 2005

Rome's last half-decade

I'm on page 379 of Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. Heather considers Avitus's elevation to the Imperial purple in 455 AD to be a "revolution" that "needs to be underlined". I think I'll pause here and note some other turning points of the previous five years:

As of 450 AD, as everyone knows, the Roman Empire had already split into a western half and an eastern half, both under scions of the Theodosian dynasty. But it wasn't really split. In reality the East was under a united Byzantine imperium, well-protected against threats from further east; and the West was being held together under Eastern persuasion. Theodosius II in the East had planted his cousin Valentinian III in the West, and recognised his "authority" - while the general Aetius, loyal to the Roman ideal, did the actual ruling of the West as Valentinian's regent and as Theodosius's proxy. With the exception of Geiseric's Vandals in Carthage; the various political factions in Italy, the barbarian kinglets scattered about the West, and the generals of the Roman legions all accepted this arrangement. There were plans afoot to bring even the Vandals back to heel.

However there was another faction that had sprung up in the interim. To the north of both halves of the Empire was a vast majority-German empire led by Attila the Hun. Attila wrought such chaos in the East that there could be no question of retaking Africa. So that set up one problem of the 450s: The Vandals were left alone.

Then, in 28 July 450, that klutz Theodosius fell off his horse and died. Valentinian figured that as a Theodosian, he had a shot at becoming the real (Eastern) Emperor, but Aetius recognised that Valentinian was a spoiled brat who hadn't a chance. Over in the East, Theodosius II's sister Queen Pulcheria chose the staff officer Marcian as her husband. This proved a wise move for Byzantine interests, but it still led to another problem: The Western Emperor rejected Eastern influence.

In 451 and 452, Attila ransacked Gaul and northern Italy. Aetius and the Visigoths kicked the Huns out of Gaul; then Marcian helped Aetius boot the Huns out of Italy. But both campaigns, particularly the second campaign, incurred a lot of damage. The native Gallo-Roman and Italian forces were depleted.

In 453, Attila died. Heather does not refer to Michael A Babcock's The Night Attila Died: Solving the Murder of Attila the Hun; but that book put forth the hypothesis, based primarily on Germanic philology, that Marcian had engineered an assassination. This did not end the Hunnish or for that matter German threat to the East; but it sharply weakened it, and ended it for the West. Beforehand, Valentinian envied Aetius and Marcian but preferred both to losing his head to Attila. This no longer applied: The common threat of the Huns was no more.

As of 454, the Western Empire was weakened and less united, and the Vandals sure weren't any weaker for their part.

Which is not to say all was hopeless. Valentinian had no sons; but he did have two daughters, and either one could have served as a bride for a child of Aetius, Marcian, or even a pro-Roman Visigoth. The Vandals had uses as a common enemy of this Catholic empire. And Marcian, an underrated genius if ever there was one, was available if given a few years to rebuild.

But instead, in 22 September Valentinian gave in to his petulance and paranoia and personally cut Aetius down with the sword. The senator Petronius Maximus soon assassinated Valentinian and took over. At that moment the Vandals struck at Rome. In 31 May 455 Petronius tried to flee, and his own citizens tore him apart in their contempt. When the Vandals actually entered Rome, their outrages earned them a name of infamy still pungent after sixteen centuries.

Avitus's revolution was not to declare himself emperor "elsewhere than in Rome"; this was a "secret" long exploded even before Tacitus's time (120 AD) and, for that matter, Marius's time (100 BC). Avitus declared himself emperor at a Gothic court, that of the Visigothic king Theodoric II. As Heather points out, he had little alternative. His propagandists, like Sidonius, had to play along. So instead of Romans leading Visigothic armies to quell revolts in Spain, as had happened before; now Avitus had to endorse a Visigothic army which acted on its own in Spain - which meant pillage for Theodoric and no new tax revenues for Rome. Roman hegemony was over. (And this set the stage for two decades of papier-mache emperors and the introduction of Gary Jennings's Raptor; which is quite another rant.)

Thus ended Rome's last chance at preserving romania as an imperial concern west of the Balkans and Libya. As I see it, most of that can be laid at the feet of Valentinian III, a selfish and immature little brat to the end.

I am sure that Marcian and Pulcheria received the news of Avitus's "triumphal" entry into Rome from their vantage point in Constantinople. What I can't imagine is what they thought of the event. Marcian died in 457 AD; it may have been from a broken heart.

posted by Zimri on 20:38 | link |

What killed the people of New Orleans?

Here is an eye-opening statistic: 48% of Katrina causalties in New Orleans were Black. 41% were White, 2% Hispanic, and 8% Unknown - which tells me that they're lumping a few Hispanics and Creoles in with the Whites and Unknowns. (h/t Malkin.)

Also, New Orleans is 66% Black but is surrounded by White-majority suburbs like Metairie. No indication of whether the morgue reporting all the deaths was also serving the suburbs, or even if an appreciable portion of the bodies had floated over.

It would be interesting - scratch that, it is a moral imperative - to do some regression analysis on the statistics: median age of Black deaths, and cause, versus those of Whites; the exact location of the causalties as discovered; and the last place those poor souls had been seen alive.

Then we can answer: Was it drowning, starvation, murder, or wind which killed them? Who was at most risk from what? This will help us plan for future events of this sort.

posted by Zimri on 17:04 | link |

The borderlands

Normally I oppose the death penalty; my only exception is for those making war against us. If Tookie Williams had simply killed a lot of people, then I would not support his impending execution.

There are many lines of argument to which Tookie apologists have resorted. Lair points out that they are mutually distinct.

Besides, most of these arguments don't apply. Tookie did the crimes of which he was accused, and a whole lot more. Whether the death penalty applies or not, then, depends first on whether Tookie had actually repented of his evil.

This is what a repentance looks like: His first step would be to admit that had done it. After which, he would have the choice of accepting his fate or else pleading for his worthless life; either one would do. The point is in any case moot, because he did not progress to Step A.

Since he has not confessed, that means his anti-gang comments while on Death Row were meaningless. If children were to treat him as a role model, Tookie's model so far has been: do what the hell you want, deny it all afterward, make a big stink for the global press and you'll do a-ok. His entire tenure on the 'Row has been a long, debilitating attack against the American justice system; for that matter, against objective morality.

For his part in founding an organisation dedicated to breaking the laws and the peace of the United States of America, and which remains in business collusion with many of this nation's enemies, Tookie has skated very close to the line of treason. The decades-long game he has played with our system of justice has, at last, shown us that he has crossed this line.

Craig, commenting at Protein Wisdom, sums it up: "You tookie, now we takie."

posted by Zimri on 16:41 | link |

Vulgarity

I'm not one to complain about excessive vulgarity. However, if I were to do so, I wouldn't use phrases like "dung piles", "human cesspools", and "ever more downward in the sewer" in that essay. Also if I were to write a critique of style, I wouldn't be mixing metaphors in it, e.g.: "we hear from slime meisters like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, the worst of Pryor's influence has been turned into an aspect of the new minstrelsy" and "the ultimate coon show update of human cesspools".

Stanley Crouch, your life is calling...

posted by Zimri on 12:35 | link |

Christian ethics

I'm always on the lookout for breaches of ethics... and I do believe I've found one today.

Check this out: The San Francisco Chronicle quotes the introduction to Biology for Christian Schools, "The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second." (The Mercury News has further excerpts.) Some yokels are trying to force the University of California system to accept this tract as a valid textbook for applicants.

For that cited sentence alone, UC has no choice but to reject all applicants to their biology curriculum who have been taught from this book as a primary source. Science textbooks, by the ethics of science, must have the interests of science as their foremost concern. Anything less, and it is no longer a science book; and by extension its students are no longer scientists.

Answers in Genesis omits that key phrase, clearly showing their ethical priorities.

Since UC lies under the Ninth Circuit, I expect the yokels to lose their case. Unfortunately that is likely the plaintiffs' goal; to chalk up another martyrdom to them damn seckoolar hyoomanist lib'ruls and to scare up the bubba vote next year. May the gods save us if this goes before a Scalia-dominated court.

Here's hoping their ploy doesn't work.

posted by Zimri on 12:18 | link |

Thursday, December 08, 2005

In Limbo

Amy Wellborn points to another case in which New Testament heroes alluded to doctrines which they assumed to such an extent that they did not even bother stating them. In this case, Jesus assumes that unborn babes are innocent of sin and Paul stated that they are not.

At the Last Supper, Jesus warned his betrayer that if his betrayal succeeded, it would be better if the betrayer "had never been born". Jesus did not say that it would have been better had he not been conceived.

As with Jeremiah, this has implications for defining that moment at which the soul begins.

In standard (Pauline) Christianity, all the sons and daughters of Eve are inherently tainted with Eve's sin. Under mediaeval Catholic doctrine, the Virgin Mary was conceived in a miraculous exemption from this (the much-misunderstood "immaculate conception"). But (1) this is unpopular outside the Church and (2) it is at best an exception testing the rule; besides, Jesus died childless and Mary's other children descended from Joseph - and so acquired Original Sin from Joseph's bloodline. Therefore, all of us today are conceived as full humans with the same need for salvation from that sin, even when we are unborn and so incapable of moral judgement.

Jesus never taught this proto-Catholic doctrine. He held with the Jewish (and Muslim) view, that infants are innocent up to the time of birth. I expect that he would have accepted that Adam and Eve sinned and that this sin resulted in their bodily exile from Eden, but that he would have inferred that this sin did not prevent their souls from reattaining that greater Paradise prepared for "those who repent and do good". From that it follows that this original sin is unbinding on future generations; "no man shall bear another man's load".

If this sounds more Islamic than Christian, well, Jesus was more Islamic than Christian. Starting with Paul, most Christians ignore or else misunderstand Jesus's teachings.

Jesus's view is more consistent with human justice. We accept that a judge might render decisions upon a child based on the mismanagement of his parents or even community; but ethical judges do not condemn such children to death or to torment. Jesus also implicitly links sin with individual choice, while also allowing that a bad choice now may be the logical end result of a bad life up to then: both of which accord with what we know of that organ which drives decision-making (the brain).

It would appear that Christians should dismantle the edifice of Original Sin, in view of Christ's own teachings on the subject. This will rid us of any need for debates on Limbo.

posted by Zimri on 17:05 | link |

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

RedState.org to non-Christians: burn in hell

Paul J Cella proposes a Narnia Hate Watch:

Here at Redstate we have been struck by the level of unabashed odium that the upcoming film The Chronicles of Narnia has already provoked. Not since The Passion of the Christ have we seen such hatred for a film yet to be released. Thus we inaugurate the NARNIA HATE WATCH.

The reader should here pause to note that Cella here claims to speak for the editorial board of redstate.org. Since no RedState posters have stepped forward to disabuse him of this notion, as of now we should accept his claim at face value.

He, or rather RedState, then continues: "It is plain to see that men who despise something else make Narnia their stalking horse. They despise American Christianity, or they despise Christianity in general," - fair enough so far - and then he comes out with this: "or perhaps the challenge of the cross confounds and infuriates them. As the Apostle wrote, �For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing.� "

To be blunt: Cella has put RedState's readers on notice that in the editorial opinion of that site, disbelievers in "the challenge of the cross" are "perishing". We non-Christians are going to Hell.

That non-Christians deserve hellfire is standard Christian doctrine as the Bible preaches, of course. I'm not quarrelling with the conclusion nor even with the tone of Cella's comment.

But I do take issue with the means by which Cella reached it. "Perhaps", to borrow from Cella's weaselly language, it isn't some nebulous and undefined "challenge of the cross" which "infuriates" us. Speaking for myself, what infuriates me is when someone refers to an eminently debatable point of salvation-history, and tells us that our disbelief in it is in itself proof of our deserving eternal fire.

(If this seems too abstract, consider this. What if I said that Cella deserves to be locked in a dungeon, wherein some brute horsewhips him twenty times a day, for twenty years? I am surmising that you would call this unfair. A belief in hellfire for your neighbourhood rabbi et cetera amounts to more restriction than imprisonment, more pain than whipping, and more time than decades. Cella calls this divine judgement.)

We skeptics of Cella's idea of Christianity are not intended as party to RedState's closed loop. Cella's comment is a sermon to his own choir. He is welcome to it, and to them.

But for the rest of us: in the view of RedState.org, Red State America is Christian America. RedState.org offers nothing for Republican-leaning voters in Blue State America who don't sign on to Cella's beliefs and attitudes. Nothing, that is, except for fire and death; which hardly differs from the programme of Islamic extremists.

posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Muslims are "in denial", Christians are "skeptical"

Volokh links to yet another crime against free inquiry in rural Kansas. Dr Mirecki, co-editor of The Gospel of the Savior, has been beaten by terrorists in the name of God the Creator. No word as to whether the terrorists were Christian, Muslim, or Jewish but signs point to the first of these.

Adding insult to injuries, Volokh's commenters are speculating that Mirecki staged his own beating(!). Anyway, to sum up my response:

I've written on Mirecki's work before. I find Mirecki's work to be biased but ethical. There were no hoaxes in the book I read, despite that I don't always agree with it. He might not be a gentleman (neither am I, confronted with that abuse of science known as I.D.) but he IS a scholar.

Besides, Mirecki has too much to lose for too trivial a cause. He is currently one of the most respected voices in the field of late Christian apocrypha. Someone like Morton Smith might do it for a theory on Christianity. But would even Smith have done it for something that's not even in his field, like biology?

The anti-Mirecki side of certain commenters remind me a lot of majoritarian Muslim opinion post 9/11: Oh they SO had it comin'. But it couldn't have been [our sect] wot done it. The [n/th]eocons rigged it...

Rural Kansas is the Waziristan of the United States.

UPDATE 12/9: More skepticism from Michelle Malkin, although since she is doing actual reporting I won't call it denial - yet. Malkin also links to a clearing-house of pro-Mirecki comments at Telic Thoughts, to which I tracked back.

posted by Zimri on 21:08 | link |