Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 22, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, September 22, 2024 and at 7:44 this morning, on the sabbath for goyische cats, FALL BEGINS! It’s also National White Chocolate Day, and though I’ll eat it if it’s put before me, remember that, to those who demand cocoa solids in their chocolate, “white chocolate” doesn’t have them. As Wikipedia notes, “White chocolate is a form of chocolate typically made of sugar, milk, and cocoa butter, but no cocoa solids. It is pale ivory in color, and lacks many of the compounds found in milk, dark, and other chocolates.”  Fuggedaboutit! But here’s how it’s made:

It’s also Hobbit Day (the birthday of Bilbo and Frodo), National Elephant Appreciation Day (see below), National Ice Cream Cone Day, and World Rhino Day. 

This tweet, sent by Luana, shows the WRONG way to appreciate elephants, and she suggests that the hungry people in Zimbabwe should ask for international help. I’m sure some kind of campaign raised in, say, the U.S., could provide the food equivalent of those poor 200 elephants.

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

Da Nooz:

*I don’t know how the IDF manages to find out where Hezbollah is meeting so that Israel can make targeted strikes, but it’s doing quite well. As the Times of Israel reports,

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed Saturday that it had eliminated many of the top commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force in the Friday strike in Beirut that killed Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s military operations.

Hezbollah acknowledged that the airstrike had killed two of its most senior commanders and 14 other members of the terror group who were meeting in the basement of a Beirut residential building. The devastating strike was a further blow to the Iranian proxy and brought the sides closer to a full-scale war.

The military named 11 top Radwan officials killed in the strike. The Radwan Force has spearheaded Hezbollah’s ground operations in south Lebanon.

Aqil was the head of Hezbollah’s military operations, the acting commander of the Radwan Force, and the head of a long-gestating plan to invade the Galilee. Aqil had been meeting with the senior commanders of the Radwan Force under a residential building in Beirut when the IDF carried out its strike.

Ahmed Wahbi, identified by Hezbollah and the IDF as the head of the terror group’s training unit and a former commander of the Radwan Force, was also among the dead in the strike.

The IDF said Wahbi was among those involved in the planning of a Hezbollah invasion of the Galilee, and was also part of “advancing Hezbollah’s entrenchment in southern Lebanon, while attempting to improve the organization’s ground combat capabilities.”

Over the years and during the first months of the war, the military said Wahbi was involved in planning and carrying out rocket fire and infiltration attacks. Signifying his stature in Hezbollah, Wahbi, was identified by the terror group as a “commander.” Hezbollah rarely refers to its senior operatives slain in Israeli strikes as commanders.

A chart from the IDF included in the article, with the “eliminated” in red bars. Nasrallah is in hiding, of course, and if I were Karaki, I’d be very scared, as he’s the only other one left.  I’m starting to think that Israel is doing such a good job eliminating these terrorists that they may indeed be afraid to engage in a hotter war with Israel (they are of course at war, still firing rockets at civilians in northern Israel):

*Speaking of Hezbollah, and my view that everything Israel does in the war will be demonized as a war crime, the NYT has an op-ed that just does that with the Beeper Incident: “Israel’s pager bombs have no place in a just war” by Michael Walzer.

The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the spot or reading about them from far away could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.

Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attacks but is widely believed to be behind them. If those allegations are true, it is important for friends of Israel to say: This was not right.

The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Well, that’s one argument, and I’d counter that the beepers were given to terrorists who were going to be involved in combat (why else would they have beepers?), and that they were detonated prematurely, as they were designed to be detonated during a war. A Hezbollah member intending to fight with Israel (in fact, they’re already at war), and in possession of a beeper, is not, to my mind, a civilian. Note Walzer’s admission that “the devices most probably were bing used by Hezbollah operative for military purposes.”

If you want counterarguments, urban warfare expert John Spencer, who teaches at West Point, has a Twitter thread where he praises Israel for an operation with few civilian casualties and enormous psychological impact.   Spencer and two other authors have a piece in Newsweek called “Sorry, AOC: Israel’s Precision Attack Against Hezbollah Was Humane—and Legal” (h/t Malgorzata). It syas this:

Generally speaking, under Article 7 of the Amended Protocol II to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the use of booby traps in communication devices are indeed prohibited in certain situations. There is, of course, an overriding caveat, which is that pursuant to Article 52 of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention I, such acts are permissible in circumstances where the objects in question are no longer used for civilian purposes.

In this case, the pagers and hand-held devices, which were distributed specifically to Hezbollah operatives, were being used for the purposes of communicating, planning and conducting operations. As such, they immediately ceased to be considered “civilian objects” and became legitimate military targets.

Accordingly, their destruction constitutes a clear military objective under customary international law (per Art. 52 of the Additional Protocols), and they are a lawful target of attack.

Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, says this:

“The targets of the attack were terrorist fighters who are involved, directly or indirectly, in active combat operations against Israel including rocket and drone attacks every day for almost a year. Under international law that makes them legitimate and lawful targets for attack as Israel seeks to defend its citizens from violent aggression,” he said.

Further, International Law expert Natasha Hausdorff (she’s pro-Israel) disagrees that the pager attacks were illegal “booby traps” using the “noncombatant” trope (start 30 seconds into the debate). Hausdorff says “You can’t really think of a better example of complying with international humanitarian law.”

It’s hard not to think that the NYT really does want Israel to lose this war.

*BTW, the Wall Street Journal has an article about where the rigged beepers came from, and it’s still a mystery, with the WSJ concluding only that Israel had somehow infiltrated one of the many “shell companies” set up by Iran to evade sanctions. For decades, Iran and the militant groups it supports, such as Hezbollah, have used shell companies across the Middle East and Mediterranean to obtain funds and equipment while evading sanctions. Israel has in turn created its own shadowy networks to infiltrate the supply chains used by Iran and the militant groups it backs.

Tuesday’s attack is one of a handful of examples in which Israel has likely penetrated Hezbollah’s communications supply chain, said a person familiar with Israeli operations abroad. “But it’s the first time it ended with a bang like this,” he said.

People briefed on the operation said Israel breached Hezbollah’s supply chain and laced the batteries of the devices with explosives. The devices were then detonated remotely.

Hezbollah has begun an investigation into the supply-chain breach.

Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Hungary have all been implicated, but there’s no hard proof, and no smoking gun.  But here’s an interesting diagram about how the exploding pagers worked (click to enlarge):

*As you may know, there have been many accusations of bodies secretly buried near indigenous schools (a nefarious attempt of Canada to “de-indegenize” its native peoples). But so far no bodies have been found, and yet the rumor persists—playing into the Sacralization of the Oppressed myth.  Now, according to Luana, who sent this link (access the archived version here), people are acting like questioning the graves’ existence is a right-wing conspiracy. Or so the NYT says (the author is Ian Austen):

An excerpt: my bolding:

Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.

It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”

Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.

Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked gravesSecurity guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

. . .“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

. . . Security guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.

. . . In Ontario, a search of records by investigators working for the province’s chief coroner has so far identified 456 students who died while attending 12 residential schools. Some records show where remains may be buried, the coroner said, but there’s uncertainty about those findings.

At the Kamloops school site, where one of the largest number of potential gravesites was reported, Chief Casimir said her tribe was still analyzing the results of its ground and document searches before deciding whether to conduct exhumations.

Doing so, she added, would be “very intrusive.”

I have no doubt that indigenous people were often treated very badly, but questioning whether there are bodies where there are “possible signs” demands evidence, and questioning whether that evidence exists is NOT right-wing.  Why are they preventing people from determining if in fact there are bodies there? Would they rather cling to their possibly false assertions rather than know the truth? It seems so.  There is suggestive evidence that children died, so wouldn’t it be better to know the truth? Or are those preventing exhumation worried that their assertions are wrong. It would be very different if 10,000 kids were buried (as some estimate) or only a handful. At any rate, they’ve eliminated these ludicrous and racist schools.

*The WaPo has an interesting cartoon-article about how the use of psilocybin (a psychedelic drug obtained from mushrooms) has a high success rate of curing people of PTSD. I can’t reproduce any of the cartoon as it’s copyrighted but you can see it and the article archived here). The intro (I believe Ben Kramer is the artist as well):

Over the past decade, the medical community has started to take seriously the idea that psychedelic drugs — including psilocybin, the compound found in “magic” mushrooms — can help treat some mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder. In Oregon, the drug has been legalized for use under the supervision of a licensed provider. Ben Kramer is one of those providers.

Kramer once suffered from PTSD himself, and he now helps veterans and first responders deal with trauma using psilocybin. Kramer is not a mental health provider, and he recognizes that these types of drugs are not for everyone. But he has also seen his clients break old patterns, build new habits and find new ways of seeing the world.

I heard Michael Pollan, an exponent of the use of psychedelic drugs to relieve suffering, lecture on how psychedelic drugs greatly improved the depression of people with terminal illnesses. Now he’s written a book about how psychedelics can help people beyond those will terminal illnesses. Here’s a 33-minute video of Pollan being interviewed about his views. See? The hippies were on to something!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are negotiating transit:

Hili: Are you going out?
Szaron Yes. And are you coming in?
Hili: Yes.
In Polish:
Hili: Wychodzisz?
Szaron: Tak. A ty wchodzisz?
Hili: Tak.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. Indeed! Fire that teacher; the student’s answer is CORRECT.

From Cat Memes:

From Things with Faces: Happy feet!

From Masih, good news about a European resolution against “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan. Be sure to expand the tweet.

From Malgorzata, “Downfall” turned into the Operation Grim Beeper, with Hitler as Nasrallah:

From Simon. It’s amazing that Jimmy Carter is still alive! And there’s this:

This is reprehensible: CELEBRATING October 7!

Every boss should do this at least once a year:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, the site of horrible experiments by Nazi doctors. I’ve seen this place.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I retweeted this first one:

And one of Matthew’s favorite genre of tweets, featuring visual illusion:

 

18 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Israel’s war tactics are just. Amazing that so many smugly self-satisfied people keep celebrating terrorism and condemning the just war that Israel is fighting against these terrorists. Let’s hope that Israel continues these brilliant efforts to demolish the terrorist leadership.

  2. I read Walzer’s Just and Unjust War almost forty years ago, and it was very interesting, but not entirely persuasive. Since then, I’ve come to agree with Sherman, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

  3. During this past week our local NPR station has been holding a funding campaign drive. Alternating with those periods, they emphasize over and over about how it is here that you can get accurate news. The full story. But alternating with these are news/information segments that had much on the pager and walkie talkie detonations. If you did not know better, you would really think that this was a unilateral action by Israel. Not a single word about the slightly bigger picture. Not one.

  4. Jon Kay also has a report this weekend about “mass graves” and the penetration of that idea into legal discourse.

    quillette.com/2024/09/20/canadas-faltering-unmarked-graves-narrative-goes-to-court-first-nations/

    An example why it matters how Canada talks about this history. At Saddle Lake, the Blue Quill Indian Residential School operated from 1898 to 1933; 7 students died and were buried in the nearby Sacred Heart parish cemetery along with hundreds of other people before and since. Some of the grave markers are lost, and the residential school building burned down shortly after it closed. The cemetery continues to be used to bury indigenous and non-indigenous people, but the First Nation had completely forgotten the existence of the residential school until they were told about it during the moral panic about “mass graves” in 2021. Meanwhile the First Nation itself has been repeatedly and inadvertently digging up old graves and reburying the bones while preparing graves for new burials in the same cemetery. This is all horrible for the guys doing the graveyard work and for the families of those whose graves were disturbed. Some kids at those schools were mistreated or forced to live at the schools. Parts of that history were really terrible. But it’s not evidence of crimes or genocide. Yet it’s repeatedly spun as a dark hint that kids were murdered by the nuns and priests, then secretly buried in mass graves in back of the school.

    http://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/whats-going-on-at-the-saddle-lake-reserve

    1. More background on this:
      Jonathan Kay: Canada’s Elusive Unmarked Graves: a Third-Anniversary Update. Quillette Blog, May 29, 2024
      Many of the public figures who stoked the country’s morbid 2021 social panic are now doing their best to change the subject.
      https://archive.ph/Ta78P

    2. The ‘residential schools’ (most pupils were day students and lived at home) issue has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Some pupils have spoken out about how they were well treated and glad of the chance to have an education, and have been damned for doing so. Undoubtedly, they were typical schools of the day, and I have heard hair-raising tales of the Christian Brothers mistreating pupils in American schools in living memory that are probably representative. Corporal punishment was standard fare even in my schools in the 1960s. There is no evidence of ‘mass graves’ and in fact in the excavations undertaken, not one body has been exhumed. It is not yet illegal to doubt the existence of such mass graves (though a cabinet minister has stated that it should be), and while one still can, it would be wise to read Grave Error by Champion and Flanagan. It is repetitive, being a collection of writings previously published, many going over (under?) the same ground, but factual. No doubt it was collected to put the other side of the case, and has an agenda, but somewhere between it and the media’s portrayal lies the truth.

      1. Agree with you. Wrt the Christian Brothers, this story is notable because it combines some of the elements (prolonged & widespread sexual assault, institutional cover-up by police and politicians) that are missing from the 2021 moral panic.

        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Cashel_Orphanage

        But again some horrible things happened at some Indian Residential Schools, and I’m not denying that’s true. Just supporting the call for honest discourse about what happened.

        1. The trans movement and the residential schools hoax are going to be great examples to give in the future about mass delusion taking hold in the early 21st century.

          The graves thing relies on people having zero knowledge of how life worked in that time and place. As if the turn of the 20th century took place in prehistory. From what I have seen, the whole government at that time was. as now, a giant bureaucracy. When a student died at the school, or away from there while enrolled, there was paperwork. Physician’s reports, witness statements. Police investigations if the circumstances warranted it.
          Signatures of next of kin to prove that they were notified. Finally, disposition of the body, released to what specific funeral home, and where interred.

          Of graves in general- I have an archaeology background, and one thing I know is true is that most graves are unmarked. They did not all start that way, but time has has that effect.
          If you go to a rustic centuries-old church in the countryside, and compare the number of registered burials with the number of extant stones and crypts, it is likely you will see a discrepancy.
          This is not a sinister plot, it is again just the nature of time.

    3. In Kamloops the natives won’t agree to a search for bodies (after the ground penetrating radar study). I think they’re afraid there’s nothing there and the government will stop shoveling money their way.

      Trudeau and the provincial government have been disgraceful.

  5. RE:

    The WaPo has an interesting cartoon-article about how the use of psilocybin (a psychedelic drug obtained from mushrooms) has a high success rate of curing people of PTSD.

    Well, color me skeptic because … :

    Caty Enders: How Psychedelic Research Got High on Its Own Supply. New York Times, Aug 23, 2024
    https://archive.ph/ZihF5

    Pamela Paul: The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects. New York Times, Sept 19, 2024
    https://archive.ph/LJoPL

    1. Skeptic is a good colour, but your first article seems to be about MDMA, not psilocybin, and the second seems to be about peanut allergies.

      1. Martin, both articles are about enthusiasm for some treatment running ahead of convincing scientific studies showing the hoped-for benefits. Despite the tremendous medical progress that has been made over the past 130 years, this still happens quite often in medicine. Transgender youth medicine (the affirmative approach) is another recent example.

        Pamela Paul’s NYT article seems to be the result of her reading a new book on this topic, by a professor of medicine from Johns Hopkins University:
        Marty Makary: Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health. Bloomsbury, Sept 2024

        And before, Makary, recently, there was:
        Vinayak K. Prasad & Adam S. Cifu: Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

        Eric Patashnik: Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work. Vox, Feb 14, 2018 [ungated, google it if you are interested]
        The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half.

        Eric M. Patashnik, Alan S. Gerber & Conor M. Dowling: Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine. Princeton UP, 2017

  6. I would not like to be the weak link in Hezbollah’s supply chain.
    How is it that so many children can go “under ground” and none of their surviving peers, locals, saw, mention, reported the deaths.

  7. I’ve been behind on the posts and can’t recall which day the tweet about the elephants being killed to feed starving, educated, landowners in Zimbabwe was posted (nor can I locate it), but I cannot stop seeing that poor elephant. Where is Rosemary (Alles)? God! What the hell is wrong with us stupid humans? We have reserves protecting these creatures and we’re “culling their herds” on the same continent. We are so f*cked up!

    1. Africa’s a big place. Maybe they need reserves for elephants in some places and culling in other places, the elephants themselves being too big to relocate wholesale over the distances involved with the resources available. If elephants are a dangerous nuisance that makes agriculture impossible where they tromp around unimpeded, it would be the height of imperialist arrogance for us to tell them not to cull elephants and then make the once-industrious farmers dependent on NGOs for food welfare forever. What happens when the NGO donors get bored with elephants and move on to The Next Charismatic Thing, like rhinoceri or leopards? Once people leave farming, they don’t go back.

  8. A few facts, then a larger point.

    1) Only about a third of indigenous children ever attended a residential school. There was a waiting list. The chiefs who signed the Numbered Treaties wanted the government to come good on its undertaking to build schools to teach modern ways.

    2) Attendance was not compulsory until the provinces being carved out of these wilderness territories in the north-west made public school attendance compulsory for all children, curtailing child labour. More darkly, the schools acted as a proto-child-welfare service that took in children who had been removed from abusive and neglectful parents, or simply abandoned as unwanted. (This remains an appalling problem in indigenous communities to this day.) Keepers of family legends may choose to elide these uncomfortable facts with tales of RCMP officers tearing children out of the arms of their loving, dedicated, and capable parents to cart them off to concentration camps. Wouldn’t you prefer to believe that you were abducted by foreigners rather than abandoned by your own mother on some stranger’s doorstep?*

    3) There is no evidence that children were murdered, died and buried surreptitiously, or went missing in a residential school. There is just too much paperwork for this to happen. And if the children disappeared, where are the frantic families searching in vain for them? When people died of tuberculosis they often drowned from massive hemorrhage under arterial pressure into the lungs Tales of “blood hitting the wall” could have seemed like murder to an impressionable child whose schoolmate had so died.

    Larger point:
    Instead of these ludicrous, racist, nefarious schools that tried to de-indigenize the nomadic Indians (who were scattered over vast areas of the plains where there were no roads or permanent settlements), what should the Canadian government have done? White people back then didn’t think there was anything wrong with their culture. Bringing it to those who hadn’t enjoyed its benefits was seen as a Good Thing, not evidence of irredeemable racism. De-indigenizing the Indians was the whole point and a defensible one: to teach them academic, mechanical, and cultural skills that would allow them to earn their keep in the Canadian economy instead of being permanent alms-seekers who would inevitably become lazy. (Remember this was long before the welfare state normalized the idea of having a permanently dependent non-working class whom you are nonetheless trying to motivate the denizens to climb out of.) Should the government have instead just left them to their own devices to starve and die out in a few generations, but with their languages and cultural traditions unsullied by ours? As it was, the attempt largely failed (albeit with many individual exceptions who attributed their success to having had an education they would not otherwise have had): Canada’s Indians remain poorly educated permanent alms-seekers today. Could a better outcome have been achieved?
    ——————-
    * My mother’s older sister, childless at the time, fostered and later adopted two indigenous babies she found left in baskets on her doorstep. That’s just what decent, caring people did for children who needed love in rural New Brunswick in the 1940s.

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