Category: Uncategorized

Everyone did rather better on this week’s quiz, although it appears a few people may have dropped out of the reading program. Overall, everyone did pretty well, but the three questions that most people got wrong were the following:

What was the principle military advantage of Athens over the Peloponnesian League according to Pericles.

What was the one demand in the ultimatum that was delivered by Sparta’s third pre-war embassy to Athens?

What did Pericles fear would cause Athens to lose its allies?

While these weren’t trick questions, all three do tend to fly somewhat in the face of the most basic understanding of the Peloponnesian War. It’s true that Athens was heavily reliant upon sea power and that their navy was both the foundation of the empire and always played the primary role in their strategic thinking, but nevertheless it merely allowed them to counter Spartan land supremacy. Without the annual tribute of 550,000 ounces of silver from their so-called allies flowing into their coffers, that naval supremacy would have disappeared in a hurry.

This ties in to both the first the third questions listed above; Pericles knew that the Athenian allies were mostly tied to them by fear, not by loyalty. He also knew that should Athens lose a single infantry battle to the assembled Peloponnesians, there would be many more rebellions like the one at Potidaea and the flow of silver would rapidly come to a close. After all, the Persian War was over and there was really no justification to continue to fund a navy that nominally belonged to the Delian League but instead had been used for Athenian expeditions ranging across Greece and from Egypt to Byzantium.

So, it was their wealth, both generated by their mercantile activities as well as the massive tribute from their allies that was their primary advantage over the Peloponnesians. However, this advantage was not secure and would be significantly reduced if Athens lost its ability to threaten its allies. Thucydides tells us that Pericles recognized these things, what the Athenian leader apparently did not recognize is that while Athens held a militarily advantageous position at the start, it was actually at a strategic disadvantage. To eliminate that military advantage, all the Spartans had to do was methodically peel away allies; this is why the single demand in their ultimatum was for Hellenic independence. Granting that would have spelled the death knell for both the Athenian empire and its military advantage versus the Peloponnesian League.

More later….

Next week’s reading is from 2.47 through 2.143, the end of Book Two. That’s from page 118 to page 156 in the Landmark edition.

Sell the news. Justin Raimondo informs us that the American Conservative appears to support my conjecture about rising oil prices being the result of the market’s anticipation of war with Iran:

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation.

It is looking rather like a long, hot, and expensive summer. Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.

By the way, I think I may have figured out the idiosyncracy that is causing the problem with HTML tags. If you place the tags on the line above or below the text that you want to bold, blockquote, or italicize, coComment will not recognize the tags. They must be placed directly in front and behind the text.

For example, this will work, albeit with less than/greater than signs rather than brackets.

[tag]HTML-formatted text[/tag]

The following will not work:

[tag]
HTML-formatted text
[/tag]

Now, this is obviously something that Blackblade and company will want to fix, but in the meantime, that should take care of the intermittent HTML tag problem that we’ve all been experiencing. I’m not sure why some people are still experiencing truncation issues, as that’s obviously been mostly fixed, but it appears to be somehow related to posts with large number of comments.

So much for the “good of the children” justification for the Texas mass kidnapping-by-CPS:

Mental health workers sent to emergency shelters in San Angelo last month to help care for the hundreds of women and children removed from a polygamist sect’s West Texas ranch have sharply criticized the Child Protective Services operation, telling their governing board it unnecessarily traumatized the kids.

The CPS investigation of suspected child abuse and its decision to seek state custody of all 464 children punished mothers who appeared to be good parents of healthy, well-behaved and emotionally normal kids, workers said in a set of short and unsigned written reports made at the request of the board after a briefing Tuesday.

All nine reports by employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state’s child welfare agency for removing the children from their community, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter. A few described ongoing tension between the two groups of social workers, including threats by CPS to have interfering MHMR workers arrested….

Three reported that CPS workers lied to the mothers; one described it as a tactic to make separating them from their children go easier. Several said the mothers were denied access to their lawyers. Some of the MHMR workers said the crowded conditions at the shelter allowed upper respiratory infections and chicken pox to spread rapidly and many noted the shelter’s other discomforts. One described it as deliberate, a form of coercion to aid the investigation: “The more uncomfortable they were the more CPS thought they would talk.”

Threats of arrest? I’m surprised the CPS would bother! After all, an arrest might involve that nasty due process that they are so careful to avoid with the FLDS people, none of whom are even being charged with any of the awful things that the CPS keeps talking about. Why not just threaten to, oh, I don’t know… seize their children?

On a tangential note, mark that government agents seldom tell the truth about anything to anyone. They’re under no obligation to do so and they won’t hesitate to lie shamelessly in order to get what they want in the interest of following their orders and doing their jobs. This isn’t any different than what one expects from the average used car salesman, of course, but for some reason people seem to have different expectations of those on the public payroll. They shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, the kidnapped children may have fallen out of the news cycle, but they still aren’t with their families. If this outrage isn’t brought to an end before long, it may be interesting to see how many of them are eventually given to politically-connected families as was the case with the MassachusettsVirginia infant that was kidnapped-by-CPS.

This column provoked a remarkably heavy response last year. It somehow seems appropriate today:

Motherhood is a sacrifice. It may mean putting off a college education and a career, or even giving them up entirely. It may mean sacrificing a flawless figure. It may mean sacrificing dreams. It definitely means putting two, three, four or more lives ahead of your own. But motherhood is also an expression of hope. Motherhood is a vote of confidence in the future of mankind. Motherhood is the brave voice of a woman saying, “I will not live life for today. I will create life for many tomorrows.”

Here’s to all the self-sacrificing defenders of civilization; the only members of society who are absolutely necessary. Happy Mother’s Day.

The only question is when you do it:

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realise that settling is the better option…. I know all this now, yet here’s the problem: much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. The very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. Consider the men older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; an actor still trying to make it in his forties; a widower with three nightmare kids who is still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer, so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party.

It’s not that these women are crazy, it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when I was younger.

Since most people don’t understand the first thing about economics, they don’t understand that there is an opportunity cost to every choice one makes, including the one about whom one marries. And just as in athletics, there is always someone better-looking, wealtheir, smarter, taller, more artistic, more caring; someone out there who possesses more of whatever it is that you find attractive.

Now, I’m not the nicest, most attentive, best-looking or wealthiest guy that has ever been interested in Spacebunny. And the “makes me laugh” factor isn’t there either, since my sense of humor tends to appall her more than it amuses her. Could she have done better if she’d played her cards precisely right? Quite possibly, but instead she chose to settle relatively early by current standards. And interestingly enough, I have observed that it is the women who settle between the ages of 21-25 – the age when they meet their eventual husband, not when they actually get married 12-24 months later – who generally appear to do better by conventional societal measures and be happier than those who marry someone they met in high school or in their thirties. The fact that this roughly corresponds with what is generally considered to be the peak of female attractiveness may be a coincidence, but it probably isn’t.

Men face a very different challenge than women due to the legal and financial risks inherent in modern marriage. For them, it’s less a question of settling and more a question of risk management.

The good news is that since everyone settles in one way or another, there’s no logical reason to allow the nonsensical stigma of being perceived to do so to interfere with your decision making, whatever it might be. And never forget that love is much more a choice than an emotion; the first kind grows with time while the latter tends to fade over the years.

Here’s the second quiz on The History of the Peloponnesian War, which runs from Book One chapter 116 to Book Two chapter 47. There is a time limit of five minutes, which is plenty of time to answer the multiple choice questions. Feel free to jump right in with your thoughts on this second section; as before, I shall add mine later today once people have had a reasonable opportunity to take the quiz.

Jay writes from the PRC:

I’m in China for a couple of weeks and the the place I’m working in has several sites blocked including your blog. I access them from a newsreader instead. However, yours seems to be showing only the post titles (with the link to your blogsite — which is blocked). Do you think you can do something with your feed settings so the whole post shows? I’ll appreciate it.

I’m a little leery of providing the full post texts since it seems to destroy the basic concept of having a blog community, but I suppose that those who enjoy the discourse will end up showing up to comment anyhow. Of course, I was once concerned about the potential problems that might be caused by permitting comments, which proved to be unfounded, so concerns about full feeds tend to strike me as being similar to the same pointless worries that cause writers to refuse to permit downloads of their books.

So, I’ll turn on the full feeds and we’ll see how it goes. That’s really the only way to make a determination anyhow; if it completely kills off the blog traffic, I can always switch it off when Jay gets back from China.

It seems Obama can’t count so well:

“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

On the other hand, perhaps this North American Union thing is quite a bit further along than anyone had suspected.

There aren’t very many rules here. However, one of them is that if you are asked a direct question that is related to the subject at hand, then you must answer it. I do not permit the defensive and dishonest evasions that are so common in Internet discourse. If you refuse to either answer the question or admit that you cannot answer it, you will not be permitted to comment here and all of your subsequent comments will be deleted.

In general, if you are constitutionally incapable of admitting that you are wrong, then this is simply not the place for you. Go inflict yourself on one of the many thousands of other blogs that is more tolerant of mindless posturing. Everyone, including me, will inevitably be shown to be wrong at one point or another, and everyone is expected to be able to admit it when it happens. So, if you are one of those sad individuals who insists on clinging defensively to your mistakes no matter what, you may as well go away now, because I’m not going to permit anyone to subject the entire readership of this blog to stubborn self-delusions.

To give a recent example, an individual made a statement about how it was a fact that the members of a large group of people habitually made a very specific claim. I asked for ten examples, which should have been quite easy to provide if this was, in fact, the case. Others who have been asked for such things have readily come up with them; I am still reading through the evolutionary studies provided by a previous interlocutor. But in this case, rather than provide even a single specific example, the individual dissembled, retroactively modified the claim, and resolutely refused to provide anything except incompetent defenses of the general example he’d offered in his original post. This weaselly behavior is not acceptable here and will not be permitted.

In short, put up or you will be shut up.