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05 Sep 2006 — They're

If you’ve lost track of all the announcements that the Forces of Good have captured or killed “al-Qaeda’s number-two man in Iraq” or “a top aide to al-Zarqawi” or some such, here is a convenient list.

al-Qaeda, like many nimble and forward-thinking corporations, clearly understands the benefits of a flat management hierarchy.

via Discourse.net

04 Sep 2006 — Messianic murder

Murderer in the Mikdash is much, much better-written than Left Behind. If you only buy one murder mystery set in the Jewish messianic era, you must buy this one.

Umm.

Let me try that again.

If you want to write a novel that explores some society that your readers might not be familiar with, throw in a dead body. It’s a cheap trick, but it works: the reader’s primal motivation to see evil-doers brought to justice will keep them paying attention to the nuances of your world. Cases in point: The Caves of Steel, The Alienist, and Small Town.

Gidon Rothstein uses Murderer in the Mikdash to explore what life will be like for Jews in Israel in the Messianic era. The book follows the opinion that this era will not be characterized by overt and spectacular miracles, but merely (ha!) an end to other nations dominating Israel. Rothstein’s kingdom has a king (who never appears onstage and is hardly ever mentioned), a “Democrats Anonymous” for people still getting used to the new order, a Temple where priests perform sacrifices, and cities where manslaughterers can take refuge from their victims’ avengers. But it also has unhappy marriages, priests worried about the Temple’s financial solvency, corruption, racketeering, and, of course, murder. (Resurrection of the dead? Not yet, apparently.)

The book’s main character is an investigative reporter and a non-observant Jew, which gives the author an excuse to describe certain mitzvot, such as the cities of refuge, in some detail. Rothstein shows admirable restraint by only spelling out details of post-messianic society that are relevant to his plot, although I wish he’d found excuses to explain more. (How, for example—this is one of my wife’s pet peeves—will transit authorities change their ways to account for the laws of niddah?) By concentrating on the seamy side of post-messianic Israel, Rothstein prevents Murderer in the Mikdash from reading like a nineteenth-century utopian novel. The Israel he describes doesn’t look terribly attractive, until you compare it with the real Israel, the one with the Katyushas.

While portraying the Jewish messianic age in fiction is a new idea (at least, new to me), the book draws heavily on stock thriller elements: the investigative reporter, the villain whose minyansminions are everywhere, the incriminating document that everyone is looking for, and so forth. If Rothstein had managed to breathe a little more originality into his characters—to bring Rachel Tucker up to the level of Elijah Baley—I would be recommending this book to everyone, even those with no interest in the religious angle. As it is, I enjoyed the book, and I think it might do well as a movie for Israeli TV, but…well, if you like this kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing that you will like.

30 Aug 2006 — Plutonic love

Matthew Yglesias sticks up for the little rock:

22 Aug 2006 — Nothing for something

A professional gambler is not allowed to be a witness before a Jewish religious court, because the Sages declared this practice to be a form of theft. The explanation that I’ve heard (I assume this is somewhere in the Talmud, but I don’t have time now to look for a citation) is that when you lay down money at a game of chance, you are not actually willing to lose it. Without that intention, the flow of money from the loser to the winner is morally tainted. The loser isn’t getting anything in exchange for the money that’s gone, and certainly didn’t intend it to be a gift.

(OK, some people who gamble are happy to give up a certain amount of cash in exchange for the thrill of the game, but those aren’t the people who keep casinos in business.)

Cf. this Globe article on college students and online poker (that page will self-destruct vanish behind the paywall in 48 hours), which quotes one college junior as saying: “When I’m down just $100, I feel, oh, I just took a $100 bill out of my pocket and handed it to someone. Your tendency is to want to win it back.”

07 Aug 2006 — Born on the 9th of Av

We are pleased to announce the arrival of a new tax deduction. The vital statistics are as follows:

Date/time of birth	August 3, 2006, 12:25 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time
Place of birth	St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Weight	8 pounds, 6 ounces, 6 drams, 8 grains
Length	20 inches
Head circumference	1411/64 inches
Apgar scores	8 and 9

The bris, God willing, will be at 6:00 p.m. this coming Thursday, August 10, at Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe, at 113 Washington St., Brighton MA. A light dinner and mincha/ma`ariv service will follow.

For the ride home from the synagogue, I suggested hanging a “JUST CIRCUMCISED” sign on the back of our minivan, but for some reason my wife vetoed the idea.

There is a Jewish tradition that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av, the fast day mourning the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish nation. Unfortunately, since I’m almost certainly not a descendant of King David, my son, despite his birthday, is almost certainly ineligible to be the Messiah.

He didn’t take the news very well.

04 Aug 2006 — I didn't know those were among the symptoms

I just got a spam email with the subject line “Bird flu—the ‘New Oil & Gas’ for investors”.

01 Aug 2006 — Sinai and Geneva

Last week, DovBear posted an essay by Michael Walzer on how the principles of “just warfare” apply to Israel’s current war with Hezbollah. Chardal objected to this whole line of argument, since it was not grounded in any Torah source. How can a frum Jew argue about “morality” based solely on principles expounded by non-Jewish jurists and philosophers? And if the Torah’s own principles on how Jews should fight wars conflicts with this “morality”, then why should we care about the latter?

31 Jul 2006 — If only we had a Standard Generalized Markup Language!

If you’ve been participating in various Web-based forums for a while, you may have noticed the great variety of ways you can avoid polluting your fingers with HTML.

• Some venerable bulletin-board systems use UBBCode™. See, in HTML, if you want to make something boldface, you use <b>codes surrounded by angle brackets</b>, but UBBCode™ uses [b]square brackets[/b], which are obviously superior.

• Some blog software uses Markdown, where you can generate an ordered list by putting a digit in front of every list item and create a first-level header by starting a line with “#”. Others (including the software that runs this humble site) use Textile, where you use “#” to make an ordered list and “h1.” to make a header.

• In the Wiki world, you can usually make a link to another page simply by writing the page title in CamelCase. If you’re composing a page on a MoinMoin wiki and you want to link to a page with normal capitalization, you put the page title in [square brackets]. But if you’re using TWiki or MediaWiki, you put it in [[double square brackets]]. And of course, if you want the text the user sees on the screen to be something other than the name of the page the link points to, TWiki and MediaWiki provide different ways to do that.

Of course, you can use HTML-style tags and escaping within most of these markup languages, but they all have their obscure rules lurking in the background regarding what they’ll accept. TWiki doesn’t allow newlines within an HTML tag (e.g., between an element name and its attributes). If you write an HTML tag in Textile with escaped angle brackets (like “&lt;b&gt”, Textile will happily translate those escaped characters back into angle brackets. (Guess how I found that out.)

Why this Babel of markup languages? I can imagine three justifications:

1. HTML is hard.
2. The alternative markup languages can be easily translated into valid (X)HTML on the server end, whereas if users are expected to type HTML into these little text boxes, then they’ll input “tag soup” that mucks everything up.
3. Alternative markup languages allow you to add markup features that HTML doesn’t have¹.

To which I say

1. And these other systems aren’t? Users who can’t stand typing in all these angle brackets are better off using one of the new Javascript-based Web WYSIWYG editors.
2. That’s why we have tools like TagSoup and HTML Tidy.
3. It would be better to add those features with language extensions that are consistent with HTML², and then use XSL on the server side to rearrange things.

Some day, perhaps, in my Copious Free Time, I will write my own damn blog software that takes its XML straight. I’m sure there are three or four other geeks in the world who would appreciate such a thing. In the meantime, if you want to write a comment on this fine blog for posterity³, you have to use Textile markup. It’s really quite easy once you get the hang of it.

¹ Footnotes, for instance.

² The user could, for example, put <span class=”footnote”>(body of footnote)</span> wherever he or she wanted a footnote marker, and the server could move that text to the end of a document and put the appropriate footnote mark in its place.

³ Hello, posterity!

26 Jul 2006 — Not kosher

OK, I’ve been defending Israel’s actions in Lebanon because, in the absence of other information, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are trying in good faith to fight a clean war, to the extent that such a thing is possible.

That’s a little harder to do when seeing news like this

A high-ranking [Israel Air Force] officer caused a storm on Monday in an off-record briefing during which he told reporters that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz had ordered the military to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut in retaliation to every Katyusha rocket strike on Haifa.

At least the IDF had the decency to be embarrassed by a threat to violate article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention:

The IDF Spokesperson’s Office later retracted its accusation that reporters had misquoted the officer and issued a second statement claiming that the high-ranking officer had made a mistake and was wrong in claiming that Halutz had issued such a directive.

Maybe I should stop reading about Middle Eastern politics and read something cheerful and seasonal.

24 Jul 2006 — It sucks to be unarmed in the Middle East

One of the main critiques (from the left) of Israel’s behavior in Lebanon goes roughly like this: hundreds of Lebanese civilians are dying under Israeli bombs, and hundreds of thousands have been made refugees; therefore, Israel is doing something wrong. Nobody denies that Hezbollah stations itself among civilians, but a lot of folks seem to believe that Israel is capable of targeting its weapons with more precision, and their failure to do so proves that they are not taking due care to prevent civilian casualties.

But none of the people who made this critique have given me a persuasive answer to a simple question: “if you were the Israeli Minister of Defense, what course would you have taken that would have been appropriately proportional and taken appropriate care to protect Lebanese civilians?”

• In 2004, Israel exchanged 430 live Arab prisoners for the corpses of three Israeli soldiers and one Israeli businessman who had been captured in 2000. That swap did not, it seems, do much to improve good relations with Hezbollah. I see no reason why Israel should reward Hezbollah by setting loose a few hundred more of its prisoners.

• Back in the opening days of the second intifada, Israel responded to suicide bombers in a measured tit-for-tat fashion. A suicide bomber would kill a few dozen Israelis, and Israel, holding the Palestinian Authority responsible for not reining in Palestinian terrorists, would bomb a PA police station. Another suicide bomber would go off, and another police station would get bomb. Eventually, the PA police officers realized that whenever they heard news of a suicide bombing, it would be a good day to work from home. The suicide bombings continued even after the PA ran out of police stations.

• Max Sawicky remarked that “Like Bush after 9-11, Israel squandered its moral authority in about 48 hours.” But what could Israel have done in two or three days that would have any significant effect on Hezbollah? (I agree that there’s no way Israel can eliminate Hezbollah entirely through military action, but there’s a long distance between “eliminate entirely” and “speak sternly to”.) After two or three days without bombs flying over their heads, the many surviving Hezbollah guerrillas would have dug in to new positions, the bomb craters in the roads would have been paved over, and new truck-mounted missiles would have been on their way from Syria.

• Well, Israel could have responded to the kidnapping of its soldiers by withdrawing to the 1967 borders, releasing all of its prisoners of war, and granting the right of return to all descendants of the Palestinians who fled or were driven out of the country in 1948. Do I even need to explain why that’s not a serious answer?

Also, just for a point of comparison, here is how the US Army in WW2 showed due care for the lives of German civilians. No, I’m not talking about Dresden, which was arguably an anomaly. This was standard operating procedure:

The Americans, in avoiding the heavy concentration of anti-aircraft fire around military targets, dropped from high altitudes and often with little ability to really aim for what they were after. The fact that such military targets as rail junctions and large-scale processing and manufacturing industries tend naturally to be surrounded by dense blocks of homes meant this tactic could be, and often was, as lethal as deliberate city-bombing.

And how do the ethics of air power apply to a ground war? The U.S. Army pushed through central Germany in the spring of 1945, with the German military before it mostly reduced to small ill-trained units, but when the Americans met any sustained resistance they pulled back, called in artillery, and blasted whatever was in front of them, whether it was a wooded ridge or a farming village.

The experience of Neuhof in the Frankenhöhe was typical of hundreds of other small German towns. The 92nd Cav. Recon Squadron reached it toward evening on April 15 and ran into a battle group of young SS soldiers north of the town. The Americans held off and pounded the town with artillery all night. In the morning, they waited for the fog to lift, then blasted Neuhof with phosphorous shells, setting everything ablaze. They attacked again at noon with infantry and tanks, but they still met resistance, so they poured more artillery and tank fire into the town. They finally took it at 5 p.m. that evening.

I don’t blame Lebanese civilians for having the misfortune of living next to extremely well-armed thugs¹. And if IDF officers aren’t making a good faith effort to aim at legitimate targets², but deliberately trying to turn the country into a wasteland, well, let my words be null and void and let the responsible parties on both sides go to hell (or the ICC). But if Israel is persuaded to call off attacks on Hezbollah positions simply because there are lots of civilians nearby, then that will only encourage other armies devoted to Israel’s destruction to put their own civilian neighbors in the same jeopardy.

¹ Alan Dershowitz argues that any civilians who choose to hang around southern Lebanon after Israel dropped leaflets telling them to evacuate are “complicit”. Others go so far as to say that Lebanese civilians don’t deserve our sympathy because, well, they could have evicted Hezbollah themselves, but they didn’t. (They could have? How? Voodoo?) Of course, if you swallow this line, you have no grounds to complain when Hezbollah and Hamas bomb Israeli civilians who voted the current government into power.

² According to this comment on Matthew Yglesias’s blog, there are tracking systems that are capable of identifying where Hezbollah’s larger missiles are launched from, within seconds of launch.

21 Jul 2006 — What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

While reading Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent’s story of spending a year and a half passing for male, I came across an analysis of how men in a bowling league she joined would try to help her with her game. She recounted how, as a female athlete, she got back-stabbing and catty remarks from other women; by contrast, the men in “Ned”’s league, even the men from opposing teams, kept trying to give “him” practical advice.

...[T]hey seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and helping me to do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits.

When I first read that, I thought, Oh, that’s an interesting insight into the difference between men and women. But the next day, mulling over what I had read, I realized that it had no connection to my own experience as a man dealing with other men. OK, I’ve never belonged to an athletic league, but I’ve been a member of a writers’ workshop; I’ve volunteered for various political organizations; I was a gabbai and board member at a synagogue. When it comes to helping me be a more competent member of these organizations (or not), I don’t notice a difference between how my male and female co-volunteers have treated me. Certainly I don’t see the drastic contrast that Vincent saw between one group of working-class middle-aged men at a bowling alley and another group of upper-class teenage girls at a tennis camp. Maybe this attitude is confined to all-male sports teams—but I know I’m not the only guy who avoids team sports.

And that, in a nutshell, is my reaction to Self-Made Man. Based on her experience among men in some of the most stereotypically male environments (e.g., a bowling league, a Catholic monastery, and a Glengarry Glen Ross—style sales job), she has drawn sweeping conclusions about The Inner Lives of Men, many of whom don’t want to be in such environments. (League bowling is so unpopular these days that a book on the decline of American communities uses it as a case in point. The Catholic Church in America is having trouble finding young men willing to become parish priests, let alone monks. The sales job that Vincent took had such a high turnover that managers were constantly interviewing new candidates.)

One notable weakness of Vincent’s research is her lack of investigation into how men behave and feel as husbands. She observes them in all-male environments where they are taking a recess from their marriages, so to speak (such as the bowling league), or not married at all (such as the monastery). The closest she comes to a mixed environment is when she investigates the heterosexual dating scene. When she remarks on how reluctant men are to share their emotions, and speculates on how this may be wounding them psychologically, I want to shout at her through the page: “Well, duh! Men are reluctant to share their emotions with other men. They depend on the women they’re intimate with for emotional support. That’s why, for example, men are more likely than women to get depressed following a divorce!”

Given how often men and women see one another as members of an alien species, it’s nice to have books that help people of one gender understand the feelings of the other. But the information conveyed by this book only describes a part of the male population—how large a part, I don’t know—and I worry about female readers who apply it to the rest of the gender.

There. Now I’ve shared my feelings.

19 Jul 2006 — Unilaterally correct

Billmon, assessing Israel’s prospects in its war against Hezbollah and Hamas, remarks:

Unilateral withdrawal was, in the end, a dangerous fantasy. The reality is that Israel can only disengage from [the Palestinian territories] if there is a PA willing and able to play the role of … government – providing some minimal level of public services and guaranteeing some minimal level of security, which in this context means keeping the militiamen and the rocketeers under control.

Daniel Levy, as well, doesn’t think much of that whole “unilateral withdrawal” business:

Israel withdrew from the Sinai in the context of a negotiated peace agreement with Egypt and from parts of the Arava in a negotiated peace treaty with Jordan, results: quiet borders, no military exchanges since, solid if cool peace. Israel withdrew from South Lebanon and Gaza unilaterally without agreements … enough said.

Now, I can understand why a Bibi Netanyahu fan would say “See, I told you that unilateral withdrawal was a bad idea.” But these guys are leftists. WTF? Instead of pulling Israeli troops out of a morale-sapping occupation of southern Lebanon, PM Ehud Barak should have kept them there until…what? Instead of moving Jewish civilians out of settlements where they were surrounded on all sides by hostile Arabs and therefore required a disproportionate share of military resources to defend, PM Ariel Sharon should have let them stay there until…what?

As early as 1968, Yeshayahu Leibowitz זצ״ל argued that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from the Arab-majority land that it conquered during the Six-Day War. After predicting (correctly) the corruption the state would suffer if it had to maintain an occupation of hostile foreigners, Leibowitz said:

Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs; this action to be done without any connection with the problem of peace. I speak of withdrawal from the territories and not of “returning them,” because we have no right to decide to whom to return them: to Jordan’s King Hussein? to the PLO? to the Egyptians? to the local inhabitants? It is neither our concern nor our obligation nor our right to decide what the Arabs will do with the territories after we withdraw from them. (“The Territories”, reprinted in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, p. 226)

Twenty years later, Leibowitz argued:

Some people oppose the withdrawal from the occupied territories on the grounds of security. Arab tanks will be stationed twenty-five kilometers from Tel-Aviv and fifteen kilometers from Natanyah. They ignore the fact that Israeli tanks would be stationed twenty-five kilometers from Shechem and two kilometers from Gaza… (“Forty Years After”, ibid., p. 246)

The current war with Lebanon is a test of Leibowitz’s thesis: can Israel effectively defend its border without maintaining a perpetual buffer zone of occupied territory? If Israel passes the test, withdrawal from the West Bank will be more politically feasible as well.

P.S.: An effective defense does not merely repulse the enemy military forces but protects, as much as feasible, innocent civilians on both sides. I can’t blame people for being skeptical of how well Israel is protecting Lebanese civilians, but I don’t yet see how the IDF can do a better job at this task without getting back into the occupation business—and such an occupation won’t be good for civilians, either. Remember the Sabra and Shatila massacres?

P.P.S.: All the right-wingers who are encouraging Israel to not only turn Lebanon into glass but go after Syria and Iran—and encouraging the US government to do the same—please put down your World War II histories and read Josephus. Being the most zealous nationalist army in your neighborhood is not always a ticket to glorious victory. Sometimes it’s a ticket to national destruction.

P.P.P.S.: I suppose, as an American, I should say something about what the US should do to bring peace to the region. OK, here’s what we should do: get ourselves a competent President.

11 Jul 2006 — A school for scandalously bad writing

Every once in a while, a writer from outside the SF community gets touched by our peculiar muse, and produces an excellent work that is recognizably SF, or at least something damn close to it. Books like this make the true believers grind their teeth and mutter “if only SF wasn’t considered a subliterary genre, then books like this would be published as SF, and people who liked them would actually deign to consider reading other SF books.”

Then, every once in a while, we encounter books like Prodigy, which do not bear the imprint of any SF publishing house, and thank God and Campbell for that. This tale, by a man who was “kicked out of several prep schools”, is about the prep school of the future: Stansbury, which charges $500K tuition (in 2036 dollars) to cultivate young minds using nonunion labor, cutting-edge drugs, and a rigorous educational program, thus turning out hordes of young men and women ready to fight aliens become leaders of science, industry, and athletics. The murder-mystery-cum-thriller plot is nothing special; this book is distinguished by such thrilling flights of speculation as:

The rubber-Teflon blend in the soles of Smith’s work boots…gripped the slick pavement as he pivoted into an alley off 3rd Street on Avenue R.

Wow, it’s a good thing the sneaker companies of the future thought to mix rubber with the Teflon in their soles, so that the shoes could grip the pavement better.

The dopazone molecules transferred digitally from the site’s mainframe server to Cooley’s terminal by bouncing in between thirty-eight separate destinations, all of which were decoys designed to throw off Stansbury’s built-in security system…. The dopazone molecules rode the electric currents and shot through the wrist cuff, transferring past the skin and into his bloodstream.

I’ve heard of Internet addiction, but really...!

Nothing to see here for anyone with a passing knowledge of science fiction, except perhaps as an object lesson in How Not To. If you run into any non-fen who have read this book and actually liked it, please beg them to pick up some SF thriller by a writer who’s actually competent.

06 Jul 2006 — In the United States of America, in the 21st century...

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation...

The complaint relates that local pastor, Jerry Fike, in his invocation, followed requests for “our heavenly Father’s” guidance for the graduates with: “I also pray for one specific student, that You be with her and guide her in the path that You have for her. And we ask all these things in Jesus’ name.”...

District teachers and staff led Bible clubs at several schools. Club members got to go to the head of the lunch line... A middle school teacher told students there was only “one true religion” and gave them pamphlets for his surfing ministry....

Classmates accused [sixth-grader] Alex Dobrich of “killing Christ” and he became fearful about wearing his yarmulke, the complaint recounts. He took it off whenever he saw a police officer, fearing that the officer might see it and pull over his mother’s car. When the family went grocery shopping, the complaint says, “Alexander would remove the pin holding his yarmulke on his head for fear that someone would grab it and rip out some of his hair.”

Some of my co-religionists would rather make political alliances with evangelical Christians against the secular state than ally with civil libertarians against state-sponsored Christianity. Perhaps stories like this can remind them who they’re getting into bed with.

via Lawyers, Guns and Money

06 Jul 2006 — Frontiers of ecumenicism

Some of my readers (המבין יבין‫‬) might be interested in this article about an Israeli reality-TV show in which a Jewish and Arab family swap wives.

via “Krum as a bagel” guest-blogging at DovBear

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