You bomb Japan?

Midway ref in title; pretty nice movie, should be available cheap. Anyway. On to Hitchens and indeed to Vox Day. The claim: those two bombs intended for Germany but held over for Japan were redundant for Japan as well.

Japan had extended an armistice offer. It was pretty-well known in Japan that they'd lost the war. The next question remained how they'd lose it. In Japan, some preferred to lose "honourably". Vox Day as usual picks one article and pretends that covers his whole argument. Those of us who aren't in his cult - and he is running a cult - might dredge up the memory that the US thought that the bombs would be necessary on account the US was, like, reading Japan's mail. That includes diplomatic communication, not just military-commands. I don't see where Japan's feelers for an armistice appear in that mail.

Okay, maybe Japan had dug in its heels exactly because the US (which, again, was winning) rejected its most-generous initial offer. They'd dug those heels in pretty hard as the Kyoujou Incident illustrates. Again: the US was reading Japan's mail. The US figured that demonstrations were needed. The chemical firebombs presented an impressive demonstration but they clearly hadn't worked.

Ultimately, I think we need to consider what "surrender" can mean. Take 1918. 11 November was an armistice, not a surrender. In theory Germany's government (whatever it was - we'll get to this) could have ramped up the war again. In the 1950s the Korean War will "end" in an armistice and, we all know the Kims. If that's what 1945 Japan was asking for, then who-knows. Japan keeps its Emperor, and its army; nobody in its armed-forces gets called for their crimes (731 anyone?); all the other Asians excepting Taiwan and maybe some Koreans are furious at the Allies and ponder an antiWestern alliance.

Then there's various shades of conditional-surrender. A fairly heavy shade of surrender is the deal which MacArthur accepted. Japan keeps its Emperor but must accept a Constitution as brings its army under heel, which army is now a "Defence Force" (yeah yeah the US claims its War Department is a "Defense" Department, but the Japs don't fib like Yanks do).

Unconditional surrender is what the Germans had to do - twice. First time, their government had collapsed between armistice and treaty, as did the governments of any potential allies (Hungary, Austria, the Ottomans) such that the emissaries could mount no arguments at Versailles excepting moral arguments (good luck with those against Clemenceau) and the spectre of Communism (more credible). The second time: the German and Axis armies were pretty-well extirpated once Schiklgruber and Goebbels checked out. Forcing unconditionality upon Japan meant facing a postKyoujou fanatical guerrilla in Japan's mountains. Oh, and Stalin in all Korea, probably Hokkaido next. But now we're just repeating the midwit wisdom.

Remember: the midwit wisdom is the midwit wisdom because, within the fringes, it's the correct wisdom. When the fringes turn out correct, they get into the history books and they become the midwits. But that's rare when it happens.

Oppenheimer's discontents

Let's collect critiques of Oppenheimer because why not.

Hindutva, in between runs of chasing young Christian girls around the Manipur hills, have panted that this one is BLASPHEMY. Wall Street Journal cites Doniger against them, which rates "Advanced" in the troll scale.

The counterStalinists would have us take Oppenheimer's own Communist leanings more seriously. Bruce Bawer (a homosexual whose Stealing Jesus was, shall we say, counterChristianist) points to General Pavel Sudoplatov's 1994 (so postSoviet) memoir, which implicated Oppenheimer as a spy. The Venona transcripts verify that Stalin's Politburo at least knew who Oppenheimer was, granting to him the dubious honour of a codename. Oppenheimer also kept Earl Browder briefed - that's the president of the CPUSA which outfit was by the 1940s entirely Stalin's asset in the USA. These are mostly ahadith which seem fairly vague on details, Opje not being a practical engineer himself; contrast (say) Fuchs. But Opje could assuredly read reports, hence his management position.

Lastly there's the antiwar Right headed up by Peter Hitchens. Sometimes this stance can be incoherent. On the one hand the USA is rife with Stalin's men. On the other hand the USA remains antiCommunist enough to drop unnecessary bombs (the movie has wit enough to remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because the nonnuclear firebombings had already erased Japan's better cities); because the bombs were making a point to the USSR now holding Sakhalin. So... were these bombs a... status-report? Maybe we can get around this by allowing for Truman, no Marxist himself, once in the Oval Office as the "great man" who called these two shots.

Whether the bombs were necessary for this particular war, must await another post. That question has no bearing upon Oppenheimer this movie. Although point-taken that Oppenheimer's own Kremlin ties (not just those of his associates) needed more weight attached to them. [UPDATE 8/16: yeah, he rode with Dzhugashvili.]

Oppenheimer might compare to Sound of Freedom. Also a true story except for parts that aren't. Also a fine movie.

That hideous book

A few years ago I read CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (to which I objected) and Perelandra (which I approved). Approved, also, was "The Inner Ring". I started but failed to finish That Hideous Strength, titled from a Spell from Lyndsay's pompous and otherwise-illegible epic.

The storyline juxtaposes the collapse of a marriage between a careerist and a visionary, with the man's career shown - through the visions - as in service of the Dark Powers. Unfortunately it then separates these protagonists physically for most of the book's span. CS Lewis at the time did not understand married life; his writings idealised it.

What Lewis understood better (at this stage) was feminine domination. The White Witch here is ("the") Fairy Hardcastle, one of the better-realised characters in this book. Another well-realised character is a, er... bear. And not a Talking Bear.

That Hideous Strength cast something of a shadow in dystopian and Christian literature. "George Orwell" reviewed it; it likely inspired 1984. A Wrinkle in Time wears this one more on its sleeve, in Camazotz; whose Institute, Co-Ordinated its Experiments with more success thus bringing that world fully under the Black Thing. Lately there's John Dies At The End. THS, I concede, hasn't finished teaching us moderns about the risks of transhumanism. Or, as Wall Street Journal would have it lately, about the Project State.

We might also ponder how the N.I.C.E. medicalises the criminal-justice system. We're told of how Japan has more psychiatric capacity than the US has, thus Ending Homelessness. Lewis reminds that if you are convicted of a crime in Britain, you go to British prison for six years where, if you've more-or-less behaved yourself, you get out. If you're deemed incompetent, only a doctor can let you out... and your doctor is paid to keep you in. The WSJ's Review section, for its part, reminds that once upon a time the West would take people away for mental disorders like homosexuality. I suppose today we'd do it to "homophobes". Was Michel Foucault as wrong as the Right pretends he is?

But hey - the book is Hideous necessarily if it is to portray a hideous conspiracy to deliver a hideous future. What, possibly, brought Professor Tolkien to reject this one, and inspired a more serious critique by Orwell, is the ending, which is ridiculous. You know how Prof. T. was able to illustrate, at the mountainbrink of Doom, Eucatastrophe, and how evil cannot understand Good? Lewis calls upon the angels to wrap things up. Which might, I think, work well-enough - arguably the climax of the Silmarillion is when Eärendil returns the last light of the Trees to Valinor - except that Lewis bungles how the summoning happens, involving near-pagan spirits of the classical planets. (Uranus and Neptune care little, in Lewis' sight, for the affairs of inyalowdas.)

FrontPage is a subversive site

Danusha Goska, like Horowitz, used to be a Leftist and now professes antiLeftism. She wrote something on Horowitz' site. At issue is if she can be a conservative Catholic and a feminist. Or a Catholic at all, and her sort of feminist.

As a rule, those women who insist that women can be priests will insist that women can be bishops as well, and then they will insist women can take wives of their own. There is no male or female in Christ Jesus, we know; therefore - they ask - why should male or female exist on Earth.

This necessity of a church-assembly to be a male-led space is what the Corinthians knew by instinct, which - yes - Paul denied; and in support of which contra Paul someone later, lacking the Corinthians' own letter, thought strongly enough about that he (maybe even she) forged 1 Timothy, in Paul's name. Goska is right about this much, that the compilers of the New Testament canon were either dupes or in on the scam. She's also right to note a deep, deep Problematic in Christian tradition, that we have suffered fraud within the Church as without.

CS Lewis didn't take the Higher Criticism seriously (it would make hash of his rhetoric lately named "trilemma") but even with 1 Timothy, 1 Corinthians and Galatians still exist in Paul's name. Paul was a spiritual transhumanist, if not an organisational one. And Paul had followers. I am finishing up Lewis' book as I type this; a Christian parson is a key antagonist in the story, in league with the transhuman progressives.

Goska reminds us that FrontPage is a humanist project, founded as it was by a Jewish secularist. For all that FrontPage anathematises the threscia of Islam, FrontPage remains not a Christian project. When the Friday people are done, it will move against the Sunday people. Indeed it already has.

Let's retire the patriarchy

Just today the Turtle posted a pretty good précis of Secher's article on Gurgy les Noisats dans l'Yonne. The Turtle slightly spoilt the effect by his title, Patriarchy in Europe.

The Parisian (perhaps, Lutetian) basin had monumental burials by 4700-4300 BC... at Passy. At Gurgy, au contraire, was a cemetary for the middle-classes, over a hundred bodies so-far exhumed. Luckily 94 of them had enough for DNA tests. The men mostly G2a2b2a1a2-Z38302 stayed put; the women were imported, and there weren't half-siblings.

I assume the word "bastard" if a Norman French word was not a Norman French invention; but what bastards existed in these preNorman centuries were interred elsewhere than at Gurgy. Possibly some were thrown out to the literal wolves. More-often, more-metaphorically so: foisted upon their mothers who then wandered elsewhere. The ideal of the community is monogamy and not even remarriage, at least not during a man's most-productive years.

This is patrilocalitas but I am loath to call this a patriarchía. A severe patriarch will have sons by other women: legitimate sons from second wives, or fitzes from the servants, or both. Gurgy was not The Handmaid's Tale.

We are reminded that Gurgy is the middle-class gravesite so without the polygyny we might see in, say, Neolithic Ireland; Passy might yield a more "alpha male" society.

The helical nonengine

Tsiolkovsky based his famous equation on the assumption of Newton's Third Law, that mass and velocity have no relation to each other. What does his equation look like for Einstein's Special Relativity?

I hadn't yet asked myself that question. I don't think we're even ready for that question. Alien Legacy et M. Bussard promised à nous ramjets, to use the wispy local-fluff hydrogen for propellant. Centauri-Dreams keeps talking solar-wind. But nobody's rescued Bussard since the first time I poasted this, and out in interstellar space we don't get much solar power anymore. I've been concentrating on thrust (as of now 320 tons / 450 bar) and ISP.

So: a few years ago David Burns (presumably his real name) proposed the helical engine. The claim here is that, once you get to relativistic speed, you can leverage the mass increase to increase the speed more. In fact after a certain speed, Burns would dispense with propellant entirely. So what's he doing - riding gravitational waves?

Four years on - contrast Musk - all Burns has got us is hype. There's a distinct odour of EMDrive here.

We must forgive the Jews

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog lately tried to defend biblical-inerrancy, those poor dears. But through the whataboutism we do at least get Dirk Jongkind, dealing with some commonly-flagged variants. Among these is Luke 23:34a.

It's my thought that Luke was late and tendentious. Luke might overall even be ripping off Hegesippus, or at least that one's James tradition. (Saint James has his feast-day today.) This to me, however, suggests that the verse is authentic, at least inasmuch as Luke himself (or herself) is the one who planted these words into Jesus' mouth. If I am to bolster Jongkind.

But then comes the question... how come Luke's tradents removed these words?

Jongkind argues for a theologic solution: Luke intended to portray Christ as Leviticus 4-5's sin-offering, with a nod to Galatians. Christ is Luke's Ox of God (and not, as John, the Lamb). Luke will go on to cast Peter (Acts 3:17) and Stephen (Acts 7:60) similarly. Also Farrer and Goodacre might suggest that, here, Luke is lifting Matthew's insistence that Jews own the bloodguilt of Christ forever. If the Jews ever did claim Jesus' blood, hereby Christ lifts that guilt from them near-immediately.

I have rechecked and do not find where Marcion or Tertullian objected to this comment in Luke 23:34ab; instead they bicker over the casting of lots 34c. Marcion rejected Matthew wholesale so should have been fine with this earlier verselet abrogating Matthew. Tertullian and his Claromontaine Apostolikon weren't particularly antiJewish so, likewise, wouldn't mind this bit of Luke. Washington (W) and Vatican (B) agree to omit it, along with Sahidic and the Sinai-Syriac. Bezae, which is Evangel-/Acts-only, omits it too - I think; it's asterisked as "D*". Looks like Alexandrine adoption of an already-extant minus.

The absence of forgiveness would agree with Donatist thought... except that Donatists should also object to the subordinationist Christology in the Alexandrine corpus, for instance over the Johannine Comma, which the Alexandrine text also omitted but the Western church included (early). As aimed specifically at Jews, copyists aware of the discrepancy would interpret this minus a harmonisation against the Jews. Bezae is notorious for both harmonisation and for antiJudaism elsewhere, beyond the call of Marcionite duty (Bezae accepts 23:34c by the way). The minus further downplays Luke's soteriology inasmuch as this contradicts John's.

Overall I think Jongkind has a point. His point is ineptus for his stance, here on Inerrancy.