I didn't say the words you impute to me. You feel you've represented my meaning fairly, but someone else can capture your writing and present the words as mine--just like Tina Fey's parody has been quoted as Sarah Palin's actual words.
As a matter of fairness and civility, I ask that you edit your article, replacing 'NJC' with 'You argue that' or some similar phase, so that your words are not presented as mine.
Patton was a hard charger. Montgomery tried to achieve objectives whilst conserving men and machines (his resources were scant and he hated unnecessary sacrifice of life). Patton had the more abundant resources and was less concerned with causalities. A different game, for him the end justified the means.
Who would you rather have in charge of your armies? Well it depends upon your position. If you are a front-line infantryman, or an armoured unit, you'd want Montgomery. You may be willing to risk your life for your country, but you don't want it thrown away as fuel on the fire of some General's bravado. I doubt anyone who is not liable to buy the farm and be in a body-bag by teatime would care. They'd want results over cost. Willing to lay down other people's lives for the cause and a quick win.
And yet, Montgomery's methods lost more lives, per objective achieved, than Patton's. So did Bradley's.
You're right on two points: Patton was hell on materiel, and he had a hard time accepting limited objectives. For a different take, there's V. D. Hanson's The Soul of Battle.
Incidentally, I strongly recommend Goeffrey Perret's There's a War to be Won.
njc wrote:I would hope my wife/daughter/sister were self-aware enough to avoid fascination with wealth and power, and to control the messages they put out in response to it,
What good is your "hope" when you have strongly implied the female can't resist such power and thus there was really no consent from Bill's accusers/victims. You can't have it both ways unless of course you are a god like Trump living in two different fantasy worlds simultaneously. I would think your wife/daughter/sister/mother would deserve your protection to the best of your abilities from the likes of Trump above your powerless hope. Take care. Vern
Short answer: Hope is one of the spiritual virtues.
We all face challenges. Some are ordinary, some extraordinary. We're 'rational animals' or, as Jonathan Haidt puts it, passengers on elephants. A few of us, perhaps, escape the complications that this brings. A few of us are crushed by those complications. Most of us move along making mistakes now and then, most of them small, a few of them big.
As to protection: Children deserve protection. Adult relations deserve love (as suited to the individual), the best advice we can give, and the freedom to make mistakes.
What would your wife or 19-year-old daughter say if you 'forbade' her to interview with Trump, or Clinton, or a charismatic governor or mayor? Isn't the freedom to make choices (and thus mistakes) central to feminism?
Willl do.
Clearly he was speaking from the experience of women he had met, and there's a fair chance that they were in his orbit because of attraction to wealth and power. He also has superb personal confidence and maybe some close-up charisma. Yes, they are strengths/gifts that should not be abused. Lead us not into temptation!
I would hope my wife/daughter/sister were self-aware enough to avoid fascination with wealth and power, and to control the messages they put out in response to it, just as I would hope my sons and brothers could avoid yielding to strong signals from women they didn't know, or didn't want to respond to. But none of us has perfect self-control, and those who approach it may well be sociopaths.
I don't seek to whitewash Trump, but to understand.
The whole of Chesterton's collection The Secret of Father Brown is bracketed by a framing story, which can be summed up in a small part.
There are two ways of renouncing the devil ((he said)) and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other is to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.
It's one thing to condemn what you would never do, and another to condemn what you know you could do, given the circumstances and capacities. It's one thing to condemn when you can't imagine the temptation, and another to condemn when you do understand it.
But this misses a point that may be more important. Patton got into trouble for slapping a traumatized soldier. I suspect Montgomery would never have done such a thing. But who would you rather have in charge of your armies? Hint: Patton was the one Allied commander the German General Staff feared.
No, it means that if things are on the 19th of November I can't make it. My brother is coming up from NC and we have finally managed to arrange a cousins' party for him. Some of these people I haven't seen in far too long, too. I may not know what they all look like now, and I'm sure I don't remember all their children. Some of those children are in college, others in diapers. (Michelle was about two years older than her oldest niece, and they grew up as best friends.)
We used to do these once a year, but it became impossible to get everyone together.
I'm getting ready to review a couple of your chapters. Would you like me to start at the beginning or further in?
Reviewed Jube's World of Phyries, ch 7.
Not sure if I put this up before, but here's a three page GG lesson on how to do a reveal. Oh, the guy with the pipe? We've been wondering about his secret more or less since he appeared. (He's black and blue because he beat the big monster-y guy up--several times.)
FYI, for me 11/19/02016 is now spoken for.
The allegations against Trump have to do with non-verbal sexual signalling, and that has a lot to do with Romance.
Can you name any human society that has survived on purely verbal affirmative consent? If you cannot, then it is an experiment which may doom our society. On those grounds, we should move slowly.
And if consent is not purely verbal, then there is room for mistake, misinterpretation, and poorly considered signalling based on the fascinations of power and prestige.
Reviewed Jube's World of Phyries, ch 6.
US law recognizes that an employer is in a position of power over the employee, and creates a much higher hurdle to demonstrate that the consent was free. Surely that hurdle must be even higher when the employer occupies an executive office of government.
Corra, even dance clubs would cease to function under strict verbal affirmative consent.
Can an employee in the Oval Office be considered a freely consenting partner? What about Gennifer Flowers?
I concur, so long as the word is not being intrduced to any characters.
Is 'gobs' an expression of surprise like 'blimey'?
Now we will see how well he holds up under the ordeal. It is the price one pays for locker room talk.
Two recent links off instapundit:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/p … lly-229851
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2016/10/do … pport.html
The first focuses on the conundrum, the second on an explanation. You'll probably disagree ... but how many people agree with the arguments given?
Female bodies are NOT opportunities. That opportunity does not exist. I don't care what she's wearing, how she smiles at you, or how quickly your moron paycheck makes you think your penis grows. Keep your hands to yourself unless she says VERY PLAINLY that you may proceed. It's no more difficult to do that than it is to NOT steal the diamond bracelet in the display case because the jeweler turned her back and you were therefore TEMPTED.
That would certainly be the end of the Romance genre! It would also be the end of most human courtship, since most signalling is non-verbal, and much of it is begun by the woman, with glances, closeness, and touches. I don't think even the Puritans attempted to enforce 'yes means yes'--though, according to David Hackett in Albion's Seed, it was the Quakers who were really strait-laced. On the other hand, those societies had clear limits, based on formal courtship and marriage--unambiguous gates that we have abandoned.
Those rules worked, being suited to both human nature and to the society they had. What rules are proven to work in the society we've become in the last two generations? We're in the midst of a massive experiment with our society, with the routes of retreat apparently cut off. How many people will you condemn for trying to find their way in the absence of proven and universally accepted rules?
Full context here Memphis? Mr. Trump was expressing the effect of wealth and power as a sexual attractant. He was marveling at the behavior that these women accepted. Were the acts wrong? Yes. Were they encouraged? He thought so. Was he correct in that thinking? Quite possibly, since those women chose to be in the presence of money and power.
Note that the 'power' was merely the power of money. It was not the power to jail anybody, or to start an IRS investigation, or an FBI investigation. It was not the power to trigger events overseas.
Trump's strengths in business include the ability to recognize opportunities. It exposes him to temptation. Can you say you would not explore the opportunities that one of those temptations offer?
I guess we're in the blast crater?
I still feel that 'tw*t' is obscene. I note that 'twattle' has also been spelled 'twaddle'. I have no means to force anyone to choose different words. I can state my belief and ask people to choose others, and I will think better of them if they do. But I will not call for anyone's expulsion.
The term was used as an expression of contempt, not a slur or a meta-slur. Again referring to a legal principle, nobody in any degree of sanity could believe that the person named was actually part of a woman's private parts, whereas with words commonly bandied about (including 'racist') the accusation is meant to be taken literally.
That doesn't mean I encourage expressions of contempt. They're not good for discourse, they're not good to the person to whom they are directed, and they are usually not good for the person who issues them.
... Could one not be a good person with a perfectly well developed and sound moral code despite having never encountering a religion? ....
Virtue is a skill. Some of us have more talent than others, but we all need to learn, and that means learning from others. We don't have time to make all the mistakes ourselves, and the desire to make every possible moral mistake in order to learn for ourselves is ... ghastly. And that assumes that we would each recognize our own mistakes--which is doubtful.
Civilization is not passed in the genes. It took ten thousand years to build, and we are always in danger of losing it. Look around the world.
What I think you are saying is that because we are being drowned in wrong-headed and destructive laws, we should treat all rules as destructive and wrong-headed.
Does that mean that if we're not allowed to take down an eyesore in our backyard we should destroy a cherished memento of our deceased grandmother?
In one page of the Buck Godot comics (no longer available for free) we see a sign at the spaceport of New Hong Kong warning newcomers: "Just because there are no laws doesn't mean there are no rules."
I forgot to note that I did the first two chapters of Matthew's book, and the first two of Randy's Cartel's Revenge. Since I'm up to date with CJD, I'll see next what I skipped in Phyries.
George Phblat's new film, 'Benji Saves the Universe,' has brought the word 'BAD' to new levels of badness. Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene... Simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness!
Well, maybe not that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good.
