Saturday: Hili dialogue

December 16, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 16, 2023, cat shabbos and National Chocolate Covered Anything Day.  Here’s some chocolate covered orthopterans from Thailand:

It’s also Boston Tea Party Day, when British tea was dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773), National Wreaths across America Day, and, according to Wikipedia, “the beginning of the nine-day celebration beginning December 16 and ending December 24, celebrating the trials which Mary and Joseph endured before finding a place to stay where Jesus could be born (Hispanidad)” and Day of Reconciliation, “formerly celebrated as Day of the Vow by the Afrikaners (South Africa)”.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This is ineffably sad and horrible. The IDF killed three Israeli hostages, and, of course, owned up to it.  People are demonstrating in Tel Aviv demanding the return of the remaining hostages.

*U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called attention to the odious fghting tactics of Hamas, designed to make the IDF’s task more difficult since Hamas hides its fighters and weapons among civilians—a war crime. If it didn’t do that, the death toll of Palestinians wouldn’t be nearly so high. When are people going to realize that Hamas wants dead civilians to rouse the world’s ire?

Jake Sullivan tells reporters Hamas’s tactics in Gaza have placed “an incredible burden on the IDF, a burden that is unusual for a military in today’s day and age,” by hiding behind civilians as it conducts its war with Israeli forces.

Israel “doesn’t have the opportunity to meet Hamas on a field of battle in a way in which civilians are off to one side and the terrorists are off to the other side,” he says.

Hamas on October 7 “massacre[d] 1,200 people in a brutal and savage way. They then turned around and went back into Gaza and hid behind a civilian population, using civilians as human shields, using protected sites like hospitals and schools for military purposes, embedding themselves among the innocent Palestinian people,” while vowing to commit more attacks and destroy Israel.

He says Israel has the crucial responsibility to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians, but Hamas’s ultimate responsibility for the conflict “has been lost a little bit in this whole debate.”

Sullivan blows hot and cold, but he’s been pretty consistent about the need to abolish Hamas. Now if he’d just stop trying to give Israel a timetable. . . . .

*In the NYT, Sophia Rosenfeld from the University of Pennsylvania reports on a class she teaches about free speech.

But the answer to all this confusion can’t simply be to update campus bylaws. Rather, we need to come up with better forms of speech education, keyed to the very purpose of the university, that give students the tools to work through the hard cases themselves.

Twice a week in my classroom, 40 or so students from different racial, ethnic, national, religious and political backgrounds have been trying hard to understand debates about the boundaries of acceptable speech in various places and times. They have been grappling with what those boundaries should be now, including for hate speech, sedition and more. Even as the topics have crept steadily closer to home, focusing on college presidents’ statements about Israel/Gaza and the language of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, these discussions have gone remarkably well. Students have waited their turn, listened to one another and, often, disagreed respectfully.

Mainly, I think my students can remind us of the purpose of higher education and, consequently, the kind of speech culture it demands. What they have learned in my free speech class, I hope, is not just the history of laws around speech but also two different but complementary ways of navigating speech, each of them tied to a different function of the modern university.

Students go to college largely to gain knowledge that will be useful in the here and now: the workplace, the democratic public sphere and private life. Importantly, that includes how to think about all sides of a given problem. It also includes how to get along with others across differences. But neither of these tasks is done without some informal rules. In my classroom, when we are conversing about the history of speech, we are also following a series of speech protocols that we’ve worked out in practice. No one, for example, can speak on top of anyone else, and no one can personalize the conversation in ways that draw attention to individuals rather than arguments. Free speech was never imagined, even by its earliest advocates, as a free-for-all. This is something that needs to be instilled.

Well, a free-for-all, though hardly educational, is still permissible speech. What she’s trying to forge are not what speech is permissible, but what the protocol should be for discussing things on campus. Those are different matters, and she knows the difference:

College, though, is also the place where one learns to question and to develop thoughtful critiques of the world one is being prepared to enter. If we think of the university as a training ground for imagining a better world — whether from a left, right, center or altogether different perspective — then a very wide latitude for speech is essential as well. Any position that has political salience in today’s discourse should be sayable on campus, whether formally moderated in a classroom or screamed on the quad. No, that does not mean we have to give space to pure expressions of hatred for any group of people or, in the example of last week, tolerate hypothetical “calls for genocide.” But it does mean we have to allow for, even encourage, the airing of varied positions on all unsettled questions, including those that turn on the expression “from the river to the sea” or the term “intifada,” like it or not.

Ideally, both should be taught, and I bet she does it well. In fact, I think that all students should be required upon entering college to take at least a unit on free speech, though a few days during orientation is hardly enough.  I’d love to see such a course in action, but I’m not as optimistic as Dr. Rosenfeld that the protocols forged in her class can actually work in important cases (like Palestine/Israel discussions!). That’s because everyone has to abide by the rules worked out in class. And things get heated in the real world!

This mixture of rules and freedoms makes for a difficult standard. It gets harder all the time as student bodies become more diverse, outside politics become more polarized and the internet amplifies the sensational and turns the local into the global in an instant.

But universities have to make it their mission to train students to think about these principles and, even more, the rationales behind this combination of speech rules and freedoms. Then we have to let students and others who are living in this environment — not outsiders, whether from Washington or Wall Street — try to work it out in practice. It can be done.

*From reader Ken: “Here’s a video ad put out by the gun-safety group Mothers for Democracy to commemorate the 11th anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.”

This is an excellent ad about the futility of “thoughts and prayers”, but it’s talking about gun violence, not drowning. I guess that it would freak people out to see a video showing a child getting shot, especially because this was put out on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children and six adults were shot to death. It’s also good because it mocks the value of the “thoughts and prayers” trope. (Controlled experiments on the efficacy of prayer show no positive result.)

*And one more legal item from Ken:

Rudy Giuliani just got clobbered with $150 million in damages in the case brought against him by the salt-of-the-earth mother and daughter team, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Couldn’t’ve happened to a more deserving putz.
“Putz” is right! From NBC News:

Rudy Giuliani must pay two Georgia poll workers who sued him for defamation $148 million after he falsely accused them of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.

The former New York mayor and ex-Trump lawyer has been on trial since Monday in federal court in Washington, where Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss filed a lawsuit against him asserting that his baseless claims in December 2020 destroyed their reputations and exposed them to a torrent of vicious threats and insults.

. . .“It’s an astounding verdict,” John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, said on Fox News.

Yoo also said the size of the reward sends a signal from the jury that what Giuliani and others who tried to overturn the 2020 election said was “utterly false.”

But what if Giuliani doesn’t have $148 million? I doubt that he does.

*As always, I stole three items from Nellie Bowles’s weeky news summary at the Free Press, this week called “TGIF: Totally nuts!”

→ Iranian agent at Oberlin in trouble: There’s a professor at Oberlin, Mohammad Jafer Mahallati, who was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. He has a colorful history: he has called for the elimination of Israel and supported the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. A bunch of Iranians blame him for being part of covering up the murder of 5,000 Iranian political dissidents. But that’s all old news, and Oberlin loves these things about him. He’s in trouble now, though. Finally, someone figured out how to get him, and it’s not through proving that he wants to kill infidels (which is hot and intersectional right now). It’s through proving that he once did a #MeToo, which at Oberlin is the highest crime in the land. Because decades ago, in 1997, at Columbia, Mohammad Jafer Mahallati allegedly bribed a student to have sex with him in exchange for good grades (how else does one get good grades?). Court papers show he tried to get out of it by claiming diplomatic immunity before eventually settling. At Oberlin, a grope in 1997 is never forgotten, or forgiven. He’s been suspended.

→ Many cases of anti-Zionism not being antisemitic: Across the country, sophisticated anti-Zionist protesters are reminding us how clearly not antisemitic they are. Yes, people simply have strong feelings about Middle East military strategy, not about Jewish people. That Israeli restaurant in Philly looked just like the Likud Party. Ditto that large community menorah in a public park in Oakland that was destroyed this week. In Berkeley, Jewish community members singing a Hanukkah song were interrupted with protesters screaming “Stop using your religion to justify killing.” A protester at Yale climbed a menorah and hung a Palestinian flag on it. And a Canadian news segment on Hanukkah was hijacked, the screen cutting from a nice rabbi to video of IDF soldiers shooting, then back to the rabbi. The station later blamed it on “a technical glitch.” Right. I always mix up those buttons.

→ Arrested development: After dozens of Brown University students occupied a school building calling for cease-fire (that’s the one where Hamas keeps hostages and keeps fighting but Israel stops! For peace! #Now!), Brown had the cops come and arrest them. They booked the kids right there on campus. “To expedite the process and avoid processing arrests in two locations, Brown DPS arranged with the Providence Police Department to conduct all arrest processing on-site in University Hall,” a university spokesperson wrote in a statement to the student paper. Watch the university administrators deliver the news to protesters here. I must say, I’m shocked that Brown University did this. Normally the Ivy League sends in what the students call Basic Human Rights (masseuses, therapists, more therapists). But the times, they are a-changin’. Get out by 5, or we’ll call the sheriff.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

Hili: I got you.
Kulka: I haven’t done anything.
Hili: You are on my territory.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam cię.
Kulka: Ja nic nie zrobiłam.
Hili: Wkraczasz na moje terytorium.

*******************

From a Harvard colleague, an editorial cartoon by Steve Kelley:

A coincidence but an accurate one:

Another coincidence: a flamingo-shaped flock of flamingos:

Twitter seems to be acting up today.  Just click on the “pic.twitter. . . ” link to see the tweet.

From Masih; I like to think that incidents like this mean that the theocracy is doomed, but they have far more power than do the protestors.

Pro-Palestinian protestors have freedom of speech, but they can’t help trying to deplatform and disturb people, in this case a group of Jews who want to celebrate Hanukkah by singing (second tweet).  Hanukkah has nothing to do with the current Hamas/Israel conflict, and these aren’t even Israelis.  What would Palestinians do if a bunch of Jewish activists disturbed worship in a mosque?

From Barry, who says “it’s difficult to work when every keystroke is supervised.” That’s true, but it’s also more fun. Hili is like this, but she’s the editor.

From Malcolm, caught in the act!

I don’t see this as a problem:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: gassed at age 4

Two tweets from Professor Cobb. Look at the beautiful vase topped by two ducks, and soon after glass was invented!

Look at that moose go!

18 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1431 – Hundred Years’ War: Henry VI of England is crowned King of France at Notre Dame in Paris.

    1497 – Vasco da Gama passes the Great Fish River at the southern tip of Africa, where Bartolomeu Dias had previously turned back to Portugal.

    1653 – English Interregnum: The Protectorate: Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.

    1773 – American Revolution: Boston Tea Party: Members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.

    1782 – British East India Company: Muharram Rebellion: Hada and Mada Miah lead the first anti-British uprising in the subcontinent against Robert Lindsay and his contingents in Sylhet Shahi Eidgah.

    1850 – The Charlotte Jane and the Randolph bring the first of the Canterbury Pilgrims to Lyttelton, New Zealand.

    1880 – Outbreak of the First Boer War between the Boer South African Republic and the British Empire.

    1882 – Wales and England contest the first Home Nations (now Six Nations) rugby union match.

    1905 – In Rugby Union, The “Match of the Century” is played between Wales and New Zealand at Cardiff Arms Park.

    1942 – The Holocaust: Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler orders that Roma candidates for extermination be deported to Auschwitz.

    1944 – World War II: The Battle of the Bulge begins with the surprise offensive of three German armies through the Ardennes forest.

    1968 – Second Vatican Council: Official revocation of the Edict of Expulsion of Jews from Spain.

    1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War and Indo-Pakistani War of 1971: The Surrender of the Pakistan Army brings an end to both conflicts. This is commemorated annually as Victory Day in Bangladesh and India respectively.

    2014 – Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militants attack an Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 150 people, 132 of them schoolchildren. [There were no mass protests around the world following the deliberate killing of all those Muslim children…]

    Births:
    1630 – Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, British botanist (d. 1715).

    1717 – Elizabeth Carter, English poet and scholar (d. 1806).

    1770 – Ludwig van Beethoven, composer (d. 1827).

    1775 – Jane Austen, English novelist (d. 1817).

    1849 – Mary Hartwell Catherwood, American author and poet (d. 1902).

    1863 – George Santayana, Spanish philosopher, novelist, and poet (d. 1952).

    1869 – Bertha Lamme Feicht, American electrical engineer (d. 1943). [Considered to be the first American woman to graduate in a main discipline of engineering other than civil engineering.]

    1896 – Anna Anderson, an imposter who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia (d. 1984).

    1899 – Noël Coward, English actor, playwright, and composer (d. 1973).

    1900 – V. S. Pritchett, British writer and literary critic (d. 1997).

    1901 – Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author (d. 1978).

    1917 – Arthur C. Clarke, English science fiction writer (d. 2008).

    1928 – Philip K. Dick, American philosopher and author (d. 1982).

    1932 – Grace Alele-Williams, Nigerian mathematician and academic (d. 2022).

    1932 – Quentin Blake, English author and illustrator.

    1932 – Lin Zhao, Chinese dissident and Christian executed during the Cultural Revolution (d. 1968).

    1936 – Morris Dees, American lawyer and activist, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    1938 – Liv Ullmann, Norwegian actress, director, and screenwriter.

    1945 – Tony Hicks, English singer and guitarist. [Still a member of the Hollies, which he joined in 1963.]

    1946 – Benny Andersson, Swedish singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer.

    1949 – Billy Gibbons, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

    1951 – Robben Ford, American guitarist and songwriter.

    1961 – Bill Hicks, American comedian and musician (d. 1994).

    “I personally want to “do” death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me”:
    1474 – Ali Qushji, Uzbek astronomer, mathematician, and physicist (b. 1403). [Best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth’s rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy.]

    1594 – Allison Balfour, Scottish witch. [Sentenced to be strangled and burned. Before the strangulation she was required to make a declaration in front of the gathered crowd and five ministers, for the notary public; instead she proclaimed her innocence and detailed the tortures carried out against her and her family.]

    1859 – Wilhelm Grimm, German anthropologist and author (b. 1786).

    1908 – American Horse, American tribal leader and educator (b. 1840).

    1921 – Camille Saint-Saëns, French pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1835).

    1940 – Eugène Dubois, Dutch paleoanthropologist (b. 1858).

    1965 – W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist, and short story writer (b. 1874).

    1980 – Colonel Sanders, American businessman, founded KFC (b. 1890).

    1982 – Colin Chapman, English engineer and businessman, founded Lotus Cars (b. 1928).

    1989 – Lee Van Cleef, American actor (b. 1925).

    2007 – Dan Fogelberg, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1951).

    2009 – Roy E. Disney, American businessman (b. 1930). [Lillian Disney, his aunt, also died on this day in 1997 and yesterday was the anniversary of her husband Walt’s death.]

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  3. Pretty cushy arrest process. God forbid these delicate students be processed along with drunks, drug dealers and others.

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  4. It would appear that peoples racism is becoming more evident. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declaiming that they’re not anti-semitic, they’re just against the policies of the Israeli government. How does that go then, when they’re interrupting Jewish ceremonies in the USofA, when they’re attacking symbols of Judaism (menoras etc). Do they not realise that there is a difference between Israel and Judaism?

    If these people are insistent that every Jew everywhere must take responsibility for every action of the Israeli government then why aren’t they insisting that every Muslim must take responsibility for the actions of the Taliban? How about every Bhuddist take responsibility for the actions of the Myanmar government against the Rohinga Muslims? What about every Christian being responsible for the actions of the Westboro Church?

    To call these people hypocrites is an understatement.

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  6. “*U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called attention to the odious fghting tactics of Hamas, designed to make the IDF’s task more difficult since Hamas hides its fighters and weapons among civilians—a war crime.”

    News sources pick apart the IDF’s decision making, creating constant negative headlines, but fail to point out Hamas is committing war crimes daily and has been for decades. A charitable explanation would be they think everyone knows this but I believe it creates biased journalism. Am I mistaken or not understanding something?

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    1. All part of the propaganda campaign to help the Hamas war effort. Weird, though, the best-known radio propaganda people of the Second World War were Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose who tried to wear down the morale of Allied troops and the folks at home. They were comic icons. People tuned in just to laugh together at their fake-news broadcasts delivered in all seriousness. (Like Comical Ali in Iraq, who fled for the hills as soon as Saddam fell.) These broadcasters were based in the enemy countries, financed with marks and yen, broadcasting over the enemy’s own radio stations at state direction. The current effort is endogenous although probably not indigenous. Foreign “colonizers” likely play a major role in writing the content and inducing the long-captured media outlets to cover the news this way.

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  7. Americans, how do US juries arrive at damages? $20 million for “defamation” plus another $16 million for “emotional distress” (never mind the “punitive damages”).

    That’s roughly 160-years-worth of salary for the “emotional distress” of someone falsely saying that you rigged a ballot, on top of the 200-years-worth of salary for the fact of the defamation itself. How can anything like that figure be justified? To British ears, it sounds a factor of ~ 100 too high.

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    1. In court, it was argued that a very high level of damages would act as a deterrent to future irresponsible defamatory statements like those by Giuliani.

      The claimants had sought a lower amount, according to the BBC:

      On Friday, the eight-person jury ordered $20m payments for defamation to be made to each victim.

      They were also each awarded over $16m for emotional distress, the jury ruled. Another payment of $75m in punitive damages was ordered to be split between them.

      They had originally sought between $15m and $43m in damages from Mr Giuliani, Mr Trump’s former personal lawyer.

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67723332

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    2. I doubt either of the plaintiffs will get anything near what was called for. For one thing, Giuliani doesn’t have that kind of dosh. Here’s some of what Freeman said. I would never downplay what “emotional distress” means.

      “I want people to understand this: Money will never solve all of my problems,” she said. “I can never move back into the house that I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with. I miss my home. I miss my neighbors and I miss my name.”

      And all of that harm because Giuliani is a hateful, racist liar in the thrall of a demagogue. I hope he becomes penniless, the sooner the better.

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      1. Absolutely, Mark – Giuliani’s reckless lies have caused real-life consequences and it should cost him enough that it hurts. Ditto Alex Jones.

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  8. Hi Jerry,
    I have been an avid fan of your books and recently your website and I’m hoping you can shed some light on the most recent appalling disaster in the Middle East. My main news source is the BBC and on 14 November there was a story that made something clear, if true. I don’t have the link but had sent a quote to a friend here in Crete: “Morgen Steph! This from an article on BBC this morning. God yet again wreaking havoc and killing innocent civilians. Perhaps both sides should be forced to read The God Delusion and Outgrowing God! “Not only is Mr Netanyahu against independence for the Palestinians. His survival as prime minister depends on support from Jewish extremists who believe the entire territory between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean was given to the Jewish people by God and should all be inside Israel’s borders. “”

    Obviously no simple solution but if the leaders of both sides were willing (or forced to) step down, perhaps a two state solution could be worked out. Again from the BBC earlier this week, Eyal Waldman, whose daughter was murdered in the initial attack by Hamas, has stated his hope for a two-state solution. This has a long history (Naqba, and illegal settlements, Palestinian rockets on Jerusalem , etc etc) but there is scope and reason now to let common sense prevail. I’m not a supporter of terrorists such as Hamas but rather a supporter of human life on both sides of this senseless conflict. Both sides have had despicable leadership and both need to step back and choose to to live in peace side by side as Mr Waldman has courageously and very sensibly stated.
    Have you any thoughts on how we can help? At 78, there isn’t much I can do but I’m eager to try to support the cause for peace. I would think that a vast majority of the citizens on both sides would be in favor of this.
    Thanks!

    Reply

    1. I’ll allow readers to answer this one. However, regardless of who was the Israeli Prime Minister in the past or the President of the Palestine territories, Israel has argued for decades for a two-state solution, and the Palestinians have always rejected it. One gets the strong impression that the Palestinians don’t WANT a two-state solution, but rather the end of Israel. They want Palestine to extend from “the river to the sea”. As long as the people believe this way, you’re not going to get what you want. Yes, both Netanyahu and Abbas should go, but I am wary that new leadership of the PA or of Gaza would push for a PEACEFUL two-state solution. And now Israelis are starting to disfavor it, too, as they see the results of having a Palestinian state next to Israel. The results are endless terrorism. So long as Muslims in Palestine want Israel gone and Israelis dead, there will be no solution of the kind you want.

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    2. In an ideal world, two states would exist peacefully together. However, neither Bibi nor Israel can be blamed for a two-state solution being unlikely. Many Israelis are critical of Bibi and want him out. When he goes, even if a leader more inclined to support a two-state solution takes his place, it won’t matter since the majority of Palestinians would rather see Palestine “free from the river to the sea” than have a state of their own. It seems this is pervasive in Gaza: most Palestinians seem to believe Israelis have no right to exist in the region, and for some, the world. It’s hard to imagine, even with Hamas gone, that self-grown leadership within Gaza wouldn’t hold to the same hateful ideology. After all, that same thinking is embraced by many protestors in the US who are supposedly supporting Palestinians, even speaking for them. Even if there are a substantial number of Palestinians who don’t support Hamas, I have seen no evidence that an influential contingency of Palestinians believe Israel has a right to exist. So to be hopeful that a miracle leader, one who believes in a two-state solution, would arise and be able to gain the support of most Palestinians just seems extremely unlikely. It’s also so very un-Bayesian. How many priors do we have with regard to Palestine rejecting two states? After Hamas is gone, if Palestine can get its act together and focus its efforts on building a productive and thriving society for its people, believing more in that than trying to rid the region of Israel (to paraphrase or echo Golda Meir), then a two-state solution could be realistically considered. Right now it seems like pie in the sky.

      “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

      ― Golda Meir, A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography

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  11. Chocolate-covered grasshoppers: so begins the marketing campaign for the Great Reset. Not so lovingly prepared as Crunchy Frog.

    Reply

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