Friday: Hili dialogue

December 22, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, December 22, 2023, with only three days remaining until The Six Days of Coynezaa. It’s also National Date Nut Bread Day, which is okay if you spread it with cream cheese.

It’s a thin day for celebrations: only National Cookie Exchange Day (pray that you don’t get a fruitcake!) and the Christian feast day of Saint Hunger, who didn’t get enough cookies.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 22 Wikipedia page.

Note: I think I’ll ratchet back posting over the holidays so that I too can have some fun. But I will post. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz:

*The Washington Post, which is not known for running exposés on Hamas, has done one on Israel, “The case of al-Shifa: Investigating the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital.”

Weeks before Israel sent troops into al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.

The claims were remarkably specific — that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The assertions were backed by “concrete evidence,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said as he laid out the case in an Oct. 27 briefing.

After storming the complex on Nov. 15, the IDF released a series of photographs and videos that it said proved its central point.

“Terrorists came here to command their operations,” Hagari said in a video published Nov. 22, guiding viewers through an underground tunnel, illuminating dark and empty rooms beneath al-Shifa.

But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials. That raises critical questions, legal and humanitarian experts say, about whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.

The Post’s analysis shows:

  • The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
  • None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
  • There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.

I have asked Malgorzata for her reactions to this article, which were not favorable, and I’ve put them below the fold at the bottom.

*In the NYT, David French argues that “Defending free speech is not ‘moral relativism‘.” It’s in response to right-wing calls for suppression of speech, like Ron DeSantis’s defense of a guy in Iowa who destroyed the Satanic Temple’s holiday display in Iowa.

What is happening? Why are leading figures on the right embracing the exact kind of behavior they condemn on campus? Why is it that campus activists are “snowflakes” when they tear down conservative displays, but a Christian veteran is a “hero” who embodies the “American spirit” when he engages in comparable ideological vandalism?

To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” Moral relativism is a truly poisonous accusation in conservative and Christian communities, in part because it implies a rejection of immutable or universal truth in favor of a subjective, individual standard — a concept alien, for example, to traditional Christianity.

As a free speech advocate, I’ve been fending off the “moral relativism” accusation for years. In 2019, when I wrote in support of the right of drag queens to enjoy the same access to public facilities as anyone else, that was “moral relativism.” When I wrote earlier this month that the right of free speech includes even the right to calls for non-imminent violence — again, this is a matter of settled constitutional law — a scholar named John Grondelski wrote in a Catholic journal that my position was “the offspring of the dictatorship of relativism.”

. . .Every conservative who cheers, for example, Ron DeSantis’s aggressive and unconstitutional war on the “woke” would regret the eradication of viewpoint neutrality as soon as a newly empowered Democratic government started to wield the same weapons of censorship and discrimination against them.

. . . American free speech doctrine represents a legal version of that marvelous moral rule. The First Amendment protects our firm center. It’s what ensures our ability to walk into the public square, express our convictions and challenge our nation’s moral and political norms. Does anyone for a moment think that Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, was a moral relativist? Yet he’s also the author of one of the most powerful arguments in support of free speech in American history.

At the same time, we protect the free speech of others and thereby manifest “hospitality and kindness.” We declare to our opponents that they are equal citizens of our Republic, possessing the same dignity and liberty that we possess ourselves.

That’s the key to making pluralism work. Enforced conformity is a recipe for violent conflict, regardless of whether the demand is made from the right, left or middle. The defense of liberty, meanwhile, makes diversity sustainable. It allows individuals and communities of differing convictions to flourish across those differences. Treating them all equally under the law isn’t relativism. It’s justice, and justice is a fundamental moral obligation of the state.

I’m taking flak from some of my colleagues for saying that calls for genocide of the Jews, calls that aren’t leading to imminent and predictable violence, should be permitted as free speech on campus. You disagree? Should you then say that people who say “From the river to the sea. . blah blah blah” should also be banned from speaking? Where is the line for permissible speech, and who should be empowered to draw that line? Read “On Liberty” by Mill to see why even the most odious speech, like the Nazis marching in uniform through the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois, should be permitted.

*I may have been wrong in predicting that Claudine Gay will be let go or will resign from Harvard because of plagiarism. As of Wednesday, Harvard continued to defend her copying, saying, basically, that it’s not plagiarism. (My bolding.)

Harvard University is continuing to support its president, Claudine Gay, amid a fresh round of accusations that she plagiarized other academics throughout her career. The newest charges have amplified questions about her research integrity and position at the helm of the prestigious Ivy League institution.

Gay will update her Ph.D. dissertation to add attributions for material in three spots, the school said Wednesday night, but again she was cleared of research misconduct by a board subcommittee.

The school also said that it received an anonymous complaint earlier in the week providing dozens of additional instances of alleged plagiarism, but that most had already been reviewed, and the four that were new were deemed to be “without merit.”

Harvard provided the new details about the review of Gay’s work as it faces criticism that it was holding Gay to a different standard than it does for its own students, and that its review didn’t follow school protocol.

Gay didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the latest review of her past work.

The initial review determined Gay’s published papers hadn’t violated Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, though there were “a few instances of inadequate citation,” the board said last week.

On Wednesday evening, the school added that there were instances that didn’t adhere to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources. Gay subsequently requested four corrections in two academic articles, to add quotation marks and citations for specific material.

“Neither the independent panel nor the board subcommittee found evidence of intentional deception or recklessness in Gay’s work, which is a required element for a determination of research misconduct” under the governing policy, the school said Wednesday, calling the inadequate citations regrettable.

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened a review of how Harvard has handled the allegations of plagiarism.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the chair of the committee, sent a letter to Penny Pritzker, who leads the school’s governing board. The letter quotes from the school’s honor code that says “plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community.”

I’m not sure that Congress needs to review this process, and they haven’t explained why they are doing it. But Harvard noting that Gay didn’t adhere to the rules for using sources, and especially defending her by saying that her plagiarism wasn’t “reckless” (whatever that means) or “deceptive”, is not a reason for retaining her. How did they know that the plagiarism wasn’t intended to deceive. How can someone not copy without knowing it’s deception? Is it “implicit plagiarism”? This means that every Harvard undergrad accused of plagiarism can use “I wasn’t trying to deceive” as a defense. But it’s incoherent. Given that another big donor just pulled out from funding the school, why on earth would they be keeping her?

UPDATE (h/t Rosemary) John McWhorter’s take, and his article (below) have convinced me that Gay will indeed be let go or resign. Do any readers want to bet me?

*John Mcwhorter now has a piece in the NYT on this: “Why Claudine Gay should go.”  That’s the death knell for Gay! An excerpt:

Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it. That policy may not apply to the university’s president, but the recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Dr. Gay make it untenable for her to remain in office.

As a matter of scholarly ethics, academic honor and, perhaps most of all, leadership that sets an example for students, Dr. Gay would be denigrating the values of “veritas” that she and Harvard aspire to uphold. Staying on would not only be a terrible sign of hollowed-out leadership, but also risks conveying the impression of a double standard at a progressive institution for a Black woman, which serves no one well, least of all Dr. Gay.

It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race.

There is an argument that a university president may not need to have been an awesomely productive scholar, and that Dr. Gay perhaps brought other and more useful qualifications to the job. (She held the high-ranking post of dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard before the presidency, and so may have administrative gifts, but that job is not a steppingstone to the modern Harvard presidency.) But Harvard, traditionally, has exemplified the best of the best, and its presidents have been often regarded as among the top in their given fields — prize winners, leading scholars, the total package.

. . .I, for one, wield no pitchfork on this. I did not call for Dr. Gay’s dismissal in the wake of her performance at the antisemitism hearings in Washington, and on social media I advised at first to ease up our judgment about the initial plagiarism accusations. But in the wake of reports of additional acts of plagiarism and Harvard’s saying that she will make further corrections to past writing, the weight of the charges has taken me from “wait and see” to “that’s it.”

If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month. I would even wish Harvard well in searching for another Black woman to serve as president if that is an imperative. But at this point that Black woman cannot, with any grace, be Claudine Gay.

And if Harvard declines to dismiss her out of fear of being accused of racism — a reasonable although hardly watertight surmise — Dr. Gay should do the right thing on her own. For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down.

*Iran has instituted mobile hijab courts to facilitate the oppression of its women. (h/t Jez) From the BBC (get a load of the new rules):

“Highly confidential” documents obtained by BBC Persian outline how Iran’s government is trying to crack down on women who do not wear a hijab.

Two documents from April and May reveal the judiciary could set up “mobile courts” in public places like shopping malls to punish dress code violations.

They also show schoolgirls could face action by the education ministry and that celebrities could be jailed for up to 10 years for “promoting corruption”.

Iran’s government has not commented.

However, an Iranian newspaper that published a short section of one of the directives has been charged with publishing classified documents.

Although the unrest [after the murder of Mahsa Amini] has subsided, a growing number of women and girls have stopped covering their hair in public altogether in open acts of defiance.

According to the leaked documents, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi approved a series of directives aimed at coordinating action by the government and other entities to address the issue of women not covering their hair in public – several months before parliament began debating the hijab bill in secret.

Some of the directives state that (all of these are about covering hair or uncovering the body!)

  • Police should “prepare the necessary documentation regarding schoolgirls who unveil” so that appropriate action can be taken through the education ministry
  • Celebrities, influencers and bloggers who do not cover their hair, or who “encourage unveiling” on social media, should face the charge of “promoting corruption”, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Officers will also be able to enter their homes and seize their computers and mobile phones
  • Officers can seal or shut down without permission any shops or other businesses not complying with the hijab regulations, and that any customers who violate them should be denied services, forced to leave, or handed over to the judiciary
  • Cafes considered “corrupting centres” because of the role they played in last year’s protests should be shut down, particularly those near schools and universities
  • Officers are authorised to initiate legal proceedings against women who resist warnings to cover their hair on charges including “promoting corruption”
  • There is a need for a national database of “motorcycle number plate bank” so those carrying female drivers or passengers with uncovered hair can be identified
  • Monitoring should be increased of companies whose employees “violate dress codes provocatively and immodestly during entry, exit, and within the premises”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being careful:

Hili: What do you need this scales for?
A: I have to weigh my words.
In Polish:
Hili: Po co ci ta waga?
Ja: Muszę ważyć słowa.

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

Jacques Hausser, a Swiss biologist/artist/photographer who works on shrews, sends us all holiday greetings for the International Year of Camelids:

From Divy:

From somewhere on Facebook:

From Masih, another woman attacked in Iran for her appearance and hair. Sound up (there are English subtitles):

What a cat!  D*gs couldn’t do this!

The UN’s behavior about the war is absolutely unbelievable. Now they’re defending Hezbollah attacking Israel from the north.  And, of course, Hezbollah initiated the firing.

From Jez: We used to publish “catshaming” posts like this (see these from 2014).  I even feel sorry for this doggie:

Simon suggests that this would be a good Christmas gift for Hili:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a girl killed on arrival by cyanide gas at age three:

Tweets from Matthew. First, ants tending their sisters (Matthew’s impressed by how delicate the ants are).  The translation:

Paraponella in captivity. The main food I feed is mealworms, but sometimes I feed them red roaches, which makes them happy.

This one will break your heart (and see below it).

You can see the background of the family, the letter, and the text here, but I’ll reproduce the text:

“You, my only one, dearest, in isolation we are waiting for darkness.

“We considered the possibility of hiding but decided not to do it since we felt it would be hopeless.

“The famous trucks are already here and we are waiting for it to begin. I am completely calm.

“You – my only and dearest one, do not blame yourself for what happened, it was our destiny.

“We did what we could.

“Stay healthy and remember my words that time will heal – if not completely then at least partially.

“Take care of the little golden boy and don’t spoil him too much with your love.

“Both of you – stay healthy, my dear ones. I will be thinking of you and Misa. Have a fabulous life, we must board the trucks.

“Into eternity, Vilma.”

Click “read more” to see Malgorzata’s take on the Washington Post article about the al-Shifa Hospital:

The whole article rests on one assumption: not a single word Israelis say can be believed. This is a very old antisemitic assumption that the Jews are sneaky liars and they always have some malevolent aim in every thing they do or say. In this article the words “allegedly” and “purportedly” are always attached to the words of Israeli spokesmen, never to the words of those who deny any Hamas wrongdoing or describe the horrible situation in the hospital and the death of patients.

Fuel: How could fuel have run out when Hamas had enough fuel to keep shooting rockets into Israel? What happened to the proof that Hamas siphoned electricity from the hospital to their underground kingdom? Patients often die in hospitals – why should we blindly believe a biased doctor that these two babies and some other patients in intensive care died because of Israeli actions and not of natural causes?

On Experts: the majority of experts (including WHO) interrogated by these journalists are hostile to Israel—or deeply dislike it—(I checked Twitter accounts of some of them, not all).

The question of time: Yes, there could have been some military usage of the hospital but was it now, during the war, or some time in the past? If it was in the past, Israel is indeed acting against the law by attacking the installation now. But this is just stupid, because Hamas would of course would evacuate the facility after Israel announced a week or so before that they would attack the hospital (as they did!).  Nevertheless, the Hamas installations should be destroyed so they would not be used in the future.

Then there is the story of WHO and medics “begging” Israelis for safe passage. There is not a word that it was Israelis who not only organized the safe passage but even delivered Israeli incubators to the hospital so the babies could be transported safely.

Hostages: the authors of this virulent libel are not sure whether the two hostages shown on the video from monitoring cameras were taken to the hospital for treatment or some other purposes. Of course you usually take a person (identified as a Thai worker kidnapped from Israel on Oct. 7) for treatment by dragging him inside, surrounded by armed men! Look:

They do not mention that Ahmed al-Kahout, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, has a rank of lieutenant colonel in Hamas, and asserted that many medical people in Gaza’s hospitals belong to Hamas and Gazan hospitals are covers for terrorists.  The statement by Gaza’s Health Ministry about al-Kahot’s testimony, supposedly given under “oppression, torture and intimidation” is printed without any “allegedly” preceding it; it seems to be an undisputed fact that there was torture (see video below).  But, of course, he is in Jewish hands and we all know what Jews are capable of!!!  Here’s the video confession:

Further, the article doesn’t mention that a British doctor who worked at al-Shifa (see below) was told that there were places he could not go in the hospital or he’d be shot. Why?

As for tunnels, the IDF showed substantial evidence of tunnels under the hospital, whether or not they connected with other tunnels (we don’t know yet). These tunnels had no clear purpose other than for housing terrorists.

24 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I am with you, Jerry, on free speech. I can still recall Prof Alan J Ward’s lecture introducing our government class to “On Liberty” more than fifty years ago. Mill’s thoughts have continued to be fresh and important to me ever since.

    1. The events of the last 5 years have provided support for the soundness of the old ACLU’s stand with respect to free speech. (The old ACLU’s position is now represented by FIRE, the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.) Namely, once you start, however well-intentioned, to restrict some fringe groups right to free speech, it won’t stop there. Calls for the suppression of ever more points of view will spread.

      James Bennet, the journalist who got fired by the New York Times in 2020 over the op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, and who now works for The Economist, a recent column of his, about free speech in America, alludes to this:

      It’s always seemed a bit self-sabotaging: The leftist ideology rippling out from American college campuses this century has on the one hand favoured restricting speech, yet on the other posited that the implacable forces of capitalism and white privilege entrench right-wing power. Whose speech did these ideologues imagine would wind up getting suppressed?

      A recent article from the New York Times:
      Campus Crackdowns Have Chilling Effect on Pro-Palestinian Speech
      Universities are under tremendous pressure to stamp out antisemitism, but some say that is causing fear and curbing free expression.

      I strongly recommend the documentary Mighty Ira (2020)
      Trailer here (length 2 minutes). It squarely focuses on that issue: we got to defend the right of free speech of groups whose views we abhor. If we don’t do this we are playing with fire.

      1. In the Might Ira documentary tv clips, from 1970s talk shows, are shown where black civil rights leaders defend the free speech rights of the Klan. 20 minutes or so of the documentary are devoted to the Skokie (Illinois) case, where the ACLU defended the rights of Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie (a suburb of Chicago).

        1. In both historical cases, those defending free speech were doing so because it was fundamental to their basic moral principles.
          Just like 18th century patriots spoke reverently about “liberty”, and for much the same reason.

          That is hugely different than the new left, or whatever you want to call them. They do not have principles, in the respect that we support free speech even when doing so does not convey to us some advantage.

          Concept like free speech only interest them because they have potential to be used against their enemies. Our principles are just another weakness for them to exploit.
          Nor will they care when their hypocrisy is pointed out. Shame at behavior that runs counter to one’s principles can only manifest in people with a strong moral code.

          Or at least that is what I have come to believe.

  2. On this day:
    401 – Pope Innocent I is elected, the only pope to succeed his father in the office. [Although scholars have proposed that Jerome was merely describing a hierarchical relationship rather than a biological one. Yeah, right…]

    856 – Damghan earthquake: An earthquake near the Persian city of Damghan kills an estimated 200,000 people, the sixth deadliest earthquake in recorded history.

    1135 – Three weeks after the death of King Henry I of England, Stephen of Blois claims the throne and is privately crowned King of England, beginning the English Anarchy.

    1807 – The Embargo Act, forbidding trade with all foreign countries, is passed by the U.S. Congress at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson.

    1808 – Ludwig van Beethoven conducts and performs in concert at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, with the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, Sixth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto and Choral Fantasy.

    1851 – The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., burns.

    1864 – American Civil War: Savannah, Georgia, falls to the Union’s Army of the Tennessee, and General Sherman tells President Abraham Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah”.

    1885 – Itō Hirobumi, a samurai, becomes the first Prime Minister of Japan.

    1891 – Asteroid 323 Brucia becomes the first asteroid discovered using photography.

    1894 – The Dreyfus affair begins in France, when Alfred Dreyfus is wrongly convicted of treason.

    1939 – Indian Muslims observe a “Day of Deliverance” to celebrate the resignations of members of the Indian National Congress over their not having been consulted over the decision to enter World War II with the United Kingdom.

    1942 – World War II: Adolf Hitler signs the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon.

    1944 – World War II: Battle of the Bulge: German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”

    1964 – The first test flight of the SR-71 (Blackbird) takes place at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, United States.

    1965 – In the United Kingdom, a 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) speed limit is applied to all rural roads including motorways for the first time.

    1968 – Cultural Revolution: People’s Daily posted the instructions of Mao Zedong that “The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty.”

    1971 – The international aid organization Doctors Without Borders is founded by Bernard Kouchner and a group of journalists in Paris, France. [Sadly, it’s since lost its way.]

    1974 – The house of former British Prime Minister Edward Heath is attacked by members of the Provisional IRA.

    1984 – “Subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz shoots four would-be muggers on a 2 express train in Manhattan section of New York, United States.

    1987 – In Zimbabwe, the political parties ZANU and ZAPU reach an agreement that ends the violence in the Matabeleland region known as the Gukurahundi.

    1989 – Romanian Revolution: Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife Elena flee Bucharest in a helicopter as protesters erupt in cheers.

    1989 – German reunification: Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate re-opens after nearly 30 years, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.

    1990 – Lech Wałęsa is elected President of Poland.

    2001 – Richard Reid attempts to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63.

    2008 – An ash dike ruptured at a solid waste containment area for a Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plant in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 4.2 million m3 (1.1 billion US gal) of coal fly ash slurry in the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.

    2010 – The repeal of the Don’t ask, don’t tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, is signed into law by President Barack Obama.

    2016 – A study finds the VSV-EBOV vaccine against the Ebola virus between 70 and 100% effective, thus making it the first proven vaccine against the disease.

    2018 – The 2018–2019 United States federal government shutdown, the longest shutdown of the U.S. federal government in history, begins.

    Births:
    1639 – Jean Racine, French poet and playwright (d. 1699).

    1765 – Johann Friedrich Pfaff, German mathematician and academic (d. 1825).

    1805 – John Obadiah Westwood, English entomologist and archaeologist (d. 1893).

    1858 – Giacomo Puccini, Italian composer and educator (d. 1924).

    1907 – Peggy Ashcroft, English actress (d. 1991).

    1909 – Patricia Hayes, English actress (d. 1998).

    1936 – James Burke, Irish historian and author.

    1944 – Mary Archer, English chemist and academic.

    1948 – Rick Nielsen, American singer-songwriter and guitarist. [I still have one of the (very many) guitar picks that he threw into the crowd at the Reading Festival in 1979.]

    1949 – Maurice Gibb, Manx-English singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2003).
    1949 – Robin Gibb, Manx-English singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2012).

    1958 – Frank Gambale, Australian guitarist, songwriter, and producer.

    1960 – Jean-Michel Basquiat, American painter and poet (d. 1988).

    1962 – Ralph Fiennes, English actor.

    1967 – Richey Edwards, Welsh singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1995).

    1972 – Vanessa Paradis, French singer-songwriter and actress.

    1993 – Meghan Trainor, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
    1828 – William Hyde Wollaston, English chemist and physicist (b. 1766).

    1880 – George Eliot, English novelist and poet (b. 1819).

    1902 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychiatrist and author (b. 1840).

    1915 – Rose Talbot Bullard, American medical doctor and professor (b. 1864).

    1939 – Ma Rainey, American singer (b. 1886).

    1943 – Beatrix Potter, English children’s book writer and illustrator (b. 1866).

    1965 – Richard Dimbleby, English journalist (b. 1913).

    1979 – Darryl F. Zanuck, American director and producer (b. 1902).

    1988 – Chico Mendes, Brazilian trade union leader and activist (b. 1944).

    1989 – Samuel Beckett, Irish author, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906).

    2002 – Joe Strummer, English singer-songwriter (b. 1952).

    2014 – Joe Cocker, English singer-songwriter (b. 1944).

    2018 – Paddy Ashdown, British politician (b. 1941). [The friend of an ex-girlfriend of mine lived a couple of doors down from Paddy’s mistress during the “Paddy Pantsdown” affair and had journalists outside for weeks.]

    2018 – Simcha Rotem, last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (b. 1924).

    2019 – Ram Dass, American spiritual teacher and author (b. 1931). [Born plain old Richard Alpert. Apparently, no-one notable has died on this day since him.]

    1. To borrow one of Jerry’s expressions, “anyone who has a few neurons to rub together” knows that Hamas must integrate its above-ground activities into the civilian infrastructure in Gaza (i.e., hide behind civilians). If, instead, Hamas geographically separated that activity it would provide easy targets for Israel to bomb. Hell, this war would have been over a while ago, and we would not have this humanitarian catastrophe on our hands.

  4. “… Date Nut Bread Day, which is okay if you spread it with cream cheese.”

    It’s funny, but as soon as I read that, I thought “that’s it _exactly_”.

    Now I must get some to test – I haven’t had any in ages.

  6. From David French’s NYT piece on free speech and the destruction of the Satanic Temple’s holiday display at the Iowa State Capitol:

    It’s easy not to take the Satanists seriously — the temple doesn’t even really believe in Satan, calling him a “mythological framework” — but the free-speech principle here is no joke.

    Reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s advice (frequently cited by C. Hitchens): “We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

  7. “Moral relativism” would involve supporting the free speech for Christians while suppressing it for non Christians. I know from experience, however, what a common response to this contradiction is. Since God (the true one of the Bible) is the source of morality itself, nothing done in acknowledgment of this fact can be judged on the same level as a human belief.

    Borrowing infallibility from God is one of the benefits of religion.

    1. Yeah. I’d go so far as to say it is the primary design intent, particularly for religious leaders.

  8. I think that you are correct and that President Gay will have to go. Harvard doesn’t want to fire her or ask for her resignation right now because doing so would be interpreted as caving to outside pressure. Rather, the Board will probably wait until the ruckus quiets down. A few months from now she’ll resign to seek new adventures. The Plagiarist President cannot serve as Harvard’s standard bearer in the long term.

    1. The Harvard board of supervisors has cleverly switched the question to whether she committed research misconduct. “Our hands are tied, she didn’t commit research misconduct, what can we do?” IDK what provisions are in her employment contract as president, but I hope the board could fire her for cause for violating norms for scholarly practice like those her students had to respect. Seems like a low bar to clear, but Harvard is trying to make us focus on the high bar of research misconduct. I hope you’re right that this is just a placeholder for some later agreement for her to spend more time with her family or something.

    2. Perhaps Gay (again) or members of the Board will resign if called to speak to Congress rather than risk further tanking their OWN reputations.

      The Board may be too feckless to think as strategically as you’ve mentioned, Norman. In fact, they may just be betting on the storm calming, riding on memories being short and media mobs being short-lived. I’m not sure if they’ll ask her to resign, ever, unless the pressure from donors increases and persists and the reputational damage is seen as more than a stain in the eyes of the Right and/or if Harvard loses federal dosh.

      Harvard’s euphemism-treadmill dance away from the P-word with “duplicative language” and “not research misconduct” is like a Jedi-mind attempt to wave away the issue: “This is not the plagiarism you are looking for. Be on your way.”

      But I hope you are right!

  9. … calls that aren’t leading to imminent and predictable violence, should be permitted as free speech on campus. You disagree?…

    I agree that, as regards public speech in general, the ban only on calls for “imminent and predictable violence” is good.

    For a college campus, I’d be slightly stricter, and ban any explicit call for violence that would include any other member of the university as a target. That is a clear line and so enforceable.

    It would not ban the “river to the sea” chant since that is not an explicit call for violence against fellow students, but it would ban “gas the Jews” and it would also ban “globalise the intifada”.

    PS Am I in a minority in thinking that Claudine Gay should resign but hopes she doesn’t, for a while at least, on the grounds that the longer she is there the more damage it does to the DEI concept?

  10. I disagree on unrestricted free speech. That is all very well in a libertarian society where there is masses of space for people not to infringe on others, but most of us live in close proximity to others, so if we want to get on peacefully, we must needs moderate our attitudes & behaviour. Allowing all extreme views to be aired openly allows extremists [who are able to convince the gullible against evidence, & who want to wreck society for their own ends] a toe-hold They become mainstream & you lose everything. Look at Argentina…

    1. Yet the concept of freedom of speech emerged in crowded England, matured in crowded colonial and post-revolutionary eastern America, and much later percolated its way back to crowded Europe. American settlement of her wide-open spaces, the first time in history that technology made possible fixed isolated settlements of vast empty expanses, came nearly a century later.

      If freedom to swing your fist ends at the other person’s nose, the fists and noses were a lot closer together where freedom of speech started than where it came to maturity in Wyoming.

  11. Breaking news: According to the sources below, Obama, yes, Obama, privately lobbied Harvard to keep Gay. Given Pritzker’s former work with Obama, is it any wonder? Might Obama be the reason the Board is so doggedly and foolishly willing to protect Gay, even to the point of being unwilling to utter the word “plagiarism,” except to deny it? No wonder they feel empowered. What a shame and sham!

    https://jewishinsider.com/2023/12/penny-pritzker-harvard-president-claudine-gay-barack-obama/

    https://nypost.com/2023/12/22/news/obama-pushed-harvard-to-keep-embattled-claudine-gay-report/

    (I have to say at this point that I’m proud I switched my registration to Republican about a year ago. While I’ll never be MAGA, there is too little to trust amongst most Democrats now.)

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