The military has no role in stopping the riots

To those who claim the military has no role in stopping anarchists and other criminals from tearing apart our cities: read a book.

The military has intervened to maintain public order since the Whiskey Rebellion. Here are a few recent examples.

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered soldiers to enforce integration of Little Rock schools against a racist mob.

This was a dark episode in my state’s history, but Ike was right:

“Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of the courts.”https://t.co/WOo6Fyep9x

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

In 1967, President Johnson ordered the 82nd and 101st Airborne to stop deadly race riots in Detroit.

LBJ: “We will not tolerate lawlessness... This Nation will do whatever it is necessary to do to suppress and to punish those who engage in it.”https://t.co/ICyQ7JfbmH

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

The next year, 13,000 troops were called to protect Washington, D.C. from riots that erupted after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The city didn’t recover for decades, but federal troops staunched the bleeding.https://t.co/jw2L27DNmu

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s 7th Infantry and 1,500 Marines to quell the Rodney King riots burning down LA.

Bush 41 knew that King had been unjustly treated—“what I saw made me sick”—but he knew deadly riots would only multiply the victims.

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

The carnage caused by domestic terrorists and other criminals threatens all law-abiding citizens, including peaceful protestors.

We must do everything possible within the law to restore peace in the streets—that mission can and should include our troops.

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 2, 2020

Defeating evil

The book of Revelation is chockfull of violence and warfare. Once issue is how literally take this imagery. At one end of the continuum, a reader may believe events will unfold as described, as if this is film footage of the future.

At the other hand of the spectrum is the view that this is symbolic imagery for a bloodless psychological struggle between good and evil. Spiritual warfare. Fighting for the soul. 

There's a gain of truth to that, but there was real warfare in the 1C Roman Empire. Christians suffered physical persecution and martyrdom. And that continues throughout church history.

I remember as a boy reading Perelandra for the first time. I was blown away by the sensuous sceny of the floating islands on the copper seas.  

However, I found the fight scene towards the end jarring and unsatisfactory. Ransom is gradually losing the debate with the Un-Man. He isn't necessarily losing the argument. He has truth on his side. But the Uh-Man, as a mouthpiece for Satan, is his intellectual superior. He's been around since creation. He tells the Queen beguiling lies. Incrementally, her resistance weakens. 

And that point Ransom gives up on debate and resorts to violence. On the face of it, reading it for the first time, that seems like an artistic co-out. A cheat. As  if Lewis took the action in one direction but was unable to resolve it on its own terms, so he abruptly changes course.

But coming back to it years later, there's wisdom in his denouement. Lewis was a WWI vet. And he lived through WWII. He was depressed by the prospect of another war. I once watched an interview with Freeman Dyson describing what it was like to be a college student in England on the eve of the war. The atmosphere was claustrophobic and fatalistic. The English could foresee that the Wehrmacht was coming for them. Coming to their shores. It was unstoppable. So you had to wait for the inevitable. Were you doomed? Was resistance futile?

It's best to resolve conflict through reason, but sometimes people choose evil over reason. They can't be reasoned with. They put themselves beyond the reach of reason. So they can only be defeated through superior force, not superior argument. Having goodness and truth on your side are not enough if that's the very thing evil loathes. Although Revelation uses stock martial imagery, although the imagery is stylized, it may portend real warfare. 

Assessing just war theory

A. In Christian tradition, the ethics of warfare centers on just-war theory. Indeed, for many Christian ethicists, just-war theory is treated as the unquestioned frame of reference. 

To their credit, theologians like Augustine and Aquinas were attempting to put warfare on a moral footing. Does warfare suspend Christian ethics, or is it possible, under certain circumstances, to wage war without committing murder? 

A moral difficulty in war is that you are harming individuals who didn't harm you directly, or harm you at all. The harm and counter-harm operate at a more anonymous, aggregate level, where one group endangers another group, even if no particular member of the group endangers an individual on the other side. It's the ensemble action that's threatening.  

Résumé stuffer

Democrat presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttboy touts his military record. I'd just point out that there's a difference between serving in the military and using the military to use yourself. It's clear from how he brags about his military record on the campaign trail that his military service was just a résumé stuffer, like ambitious college students who do lots of extra stuff they don't care about to put on their application form to impress the admissions office at the Ivy Leagues. 

Storm Area 51

As many know, there's a movement to storm Area 51.

Many Americans demand to know what the government has been hiding all these years. Specifically, many Americans wish to see the alien bodies and alien technology that the government has kept under wraps. Americans have the right to know! The truth is out in there...somewhere!

It'd also be nice to know whether JFK, Elvis, and 2Pac are still alive. And how they escaped from the clutches of Bubba Ho-tep.

However, the US Air Force has issued a stern warning:

What started as a tongue-in-cheek plan by UFO enthusiasts to storm a notoriously secretive U.S. Air Force base to “see them aliens” has turned into a national security issue. The U.S. Air Force has now offered a word of caution to the more than half a million people who said they would be attending the Facebook event "Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us" in September: "[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces," spokeswoman Laura McAndrews told The Washington Post. "The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.” Despite the warning, users are still posting memes theorizing the best way to break into the top-secret facility on the event page, where organizers said, "If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets."

There's likewise evidence the organizers are in collusion with the Russians due to identical strategies in war: send more people than bullets.

A key problem for people who wish to storm Area 51 is that the US military possesses the Active Denial System (ADS) which emits a non-lethal "heat ray" against targets:

However, I believe there's a perfectly simple and relatively inexpensive way to foil the ADS: people merely need to make sure to cover their entire bodies with body armor consisting of aluminum foil because aluminum foil can deflect these emissions from the ADS. For maximal protection, people should fashion this aluminum foil into the shape of a hat.

Moral dilemmas for the voting booth and battlefield

How many contemporaneously-corroborated reports of sexual assault do Republicans need to read — or tapes bragging about sexual assault do Republicans need to hear — before they understand the president is a likely sex predator?

— David French (@DavidAFrench) June 22, 2019

A couple of problems with French's tweet:

i) Making moral evaluations about voting isn't about assessing a particular candidate in isolation, but a comparative judgment about competing candidates. You are choosing between one candidate and another. 

ii) French's scruples are ironic and lacking in self-reflection when you remember that French is an ex-Marine. He volunteered for service during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. And he was deployed to Iraq.

Now warfare is notorious for its moral dilemmas. "The problem  of dirty hands". Take airstrikes which will inevitably result in the killing or maiming of innocent children. Children who are blinded or horribly burned or lose arms and legs as a result of air strikes. 

If that's justifiable, how is voting for Trump worse than that? Both soldiers and voters are sometimes confronted with moral dilemmas. Presumably, French endorses the lesser-evil principle to justify his own, voluntary participation in the horrors of war. Why does he have different moral standards for voting and warfare? 

Biblical warfare

https://randalrauser.com/2019/03/the-problem-of-evil-and-biblical-violence-a-conversation-with-an-exvangelical/

Fraternite 

It should be fairly obvious that God commanding genocide is only a problem if our master values and identity are those of modern Western liberalism. For example, nobody (and especially not the authors) really had a problem with these texts for several thousand years. For a fairly clear example of this, remember that the Crusaders recited the mantra "Christus Dominus est" when they were running Muslims through with their swords in the Holy Land.

At least as far as I am concerned, the first challenge for modern Christians is to recognize just how completely shaped we are by modern Western liberalism and secondly to then summon up the fortitude to identify and label those (typically invisible) cultural assumptions for what they are.

Daniel Wilcox 

What? Heck, I was a fundamentalist kid of 11 when I started encountering these horrific texts.:-( My dad was the minister of our small village church.

It doesn't take liberalism for a kid to know that slaughtering children is evil, and that God would NEVER command such horrific actions.

Fraternite 

Aside from maybe David and Goliath, these gory war texts in the late Hexatuch and Judges are exactly what my 3 year old and 6 year old boys seem to be inexorably attracted to. They also like the carnage in Revelation, for what it's worth -- and trust me, this is not where I am steering them. And even in David and Goliath, their favourite part is where David cuts off Goliath's head. They play act it all the time and insist on parading around the house with the invisible head. It's quite fascinating.

I have a hard time believing that you only ran across these things at 11 if you grew up fundamentalist, honestly.

Mentoring young men

This illustrates the need young men have for good male mentors and role models:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXB6PJVJ-Q

Immunity of noncombatants

Catholic moral theology teaches the immunity of noncombatants. But in virtue of what are they immune? From my reading, "innocence" is frequently the condition that confers immunity. Noncombatants are immune because they are classified is innocents, and it's wrong to target innocents. Wrong to intentionally take innocent lives. (Although "intention" is a term of art, viz. double effect theory.)

But in what respect are noncombatants deemed to be innocent? Let's consider some possibilities:

1. Morally innocent

It might be a moral category. To be morally faultless or sinless.

i) If so, the principle is too strong. In traditional Christian theology, human beings are sinners. Even children are subject to Adam's sin. Even children have evil impulses. 

ii) Perhaps in the case of children before the age of reason, it might be said that they are inculpably evil because, despite their evil impulses, they lack the intellectual capacity to be consciously evil. 

iii) But even if we grant that distinction for argument's sake, the class of noncombatants in just-war theory is far larger than children before the age of reason (which has fuzzy boundaries in its own right). 

2.  Judicially innocent

It might be a legal category. To be blames or guiltless in relation to criminal wrongdoing. 

i) But it's unclear why that would be the principle. If you have combatants on both sides, where one side is fighting a just cause while the other side is fighting for an unjust cause, you might argue that the unjust combatants forfeit immunity due to their legal complicity in an unjust war, making them liable to death or injury as a just desert. But the same reasoning can't apply to just combatants. By that logic, immunity extends to just combatants. 

ii) By that criterion, moreover, civilian policymakers who wage unjust war ought to forfeit immunity and face the same fate as combatants. Likewise, civilianswho provide necessary support services, viz. munitions factories.

3. Harmless

It might be a pragmatic category. Most civilians don't pose an imminent danger to the opposing nation or troops. They enjoy immunity because they are innocuous or nonthreatening compared to combatants. 

Certainly that captures an intuition regarding the immunity of children (with rare exceptions). However, the principle seems to lean on a rather artificial dichotomy regarding the immediacy of the threat. A military engineer may not pose a direct threat to the opposing nation or troops, but the direct threat may depend on his invention of military technologies. Likewise, take the policymakers who foment war. Or civilians who construct missiles, tanks, bombs, bombers, &c. Although there's a sense in which they are personally innocuous inasmuch as they don't shoot guns, they conscript combatants or supply combatants. 

I think each of these principles has some merit in limiting the scope of legitimate targets, but they're inadequate, either in separation or combination, to justify the absolute immunity of noncombatants across the board. 

Stolen valor

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/stolen-valor-native-american-activist-nathan-phillips-lied-that-he-was-a-vietnam-vet-in-facebook-video

Background on Mattis

Mattis opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, decertify the Iran deal…and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He opposes the president’s proposed ban on transgender service members.

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-why-hasnt-fired-james-mattis-rex-tillerson/

Mattis out

A few off-the-cuff impressions about the resignation of Gen. Mattis:

i) I recall reading somewhere, a while back, that initially, Mattis was a very influential advisor to Trump, but after Make Pompeo became Secretary of State and John Bolton came on board, Mattis lost influence. When you go from winning the arguments to losing the arguments, that's a time to exit. 

ii) As I recall, when Trump moved to rescind Obama's policy on transgender soldiers, Mattis tried to kill the ban by having the Pentagon conduct a six-month review. If that's true, then in that respect I'm not sorry to see Mattis leave. 

iii) In addition, I believe Mattis supported Obama's treasonous Iran deal. That's another reason not to regret his departure. 

iii) We don't know who Trump will nominate, and we don't know how well Trump will get along with his replacement. So I don't know what this means for US foreign policy. 

iv) The establishment is upset because they think Trump needs to be contained. Mattis seems like a honorable man, and he did an impressive job in cutting ISIS down to size, but his policy positions were uneven. 

Songbird John

John McCain is often treated as sacrosanct by civilian pundits. Here's the opinion of a retired top general:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FTlym9gn3w

Interim report card on Trump administration

Unless you're a news junkie, it's easy to loose track of what the Trump administration has accomplished thus far. Here's an interim report card: 

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/338806-sessions-is-cleaning-up-the-justice-department-and-not

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/donald-trump-first-year-accomplishments/

https://www.dailywire.com/news/24854/year-one-complete-good-trumpbad-trump-list-ben-shapiro

http://www.weeklystandard.com/devos-stands-up-to-the-transgender-bullies/article/2011728

https://stream.org/trump-ban-transgender-troops/

Teens with guns

I going to make a couple of loosely related observations about schoolyard snipers. Many advocates of "sensible gun control" seem to think we need to keep guns out of the hands of teenagers, or at the very least, military grade weapons. 

1. Some people think the solution, or at least one solution, is to have police officers permanently stationed in public schools. In that regard I'd simply point out that many many teenage boys can easily subdue and disarm a policewoman. I don't mean if her gun is drawn. I mean in the more casual atmosphere of a high school, where police officers wouldn't maintain the same physical distance or be on guard in the same way if they were walking the beat and interacting with strangers (which they usually do in pairs). They see these students everyday. 

A boy who had designs on shooting his classmates wouldn't have to smuggle a gun through metal detectors. There'd already be police firearms on site. The policewoman would be the armory. So long as he had the ability to overpower her and take her gun away, that's all he needs. 

2. Teenagers regularly enlist in the military. You can volunteer at 18, or join at 17 with parental permission. I don't have these statistics at my fingertips, but just since the advent of the all-voluntary military, we've probably had hundreds of thousands of teenagers (junior NCOs) with access to military grade weaponry. And that's not counting teenage draftees during WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. I'm guessing we've had millions of teenagers with access to military grade weaponry over the decades. How many of them have perpetrated domestic mass shootings? Surely the percentage is infinitesimal. Likewise, you can go straight from high school to police academy, which gives cadets access to police firearms. 

12 Strong

http://godawa.com/12-strong-salvific-masculinity-destroys-islamic-imperialism/

The lantern of the soul

Craig fields a question comparing ISIS to OT holy war:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcuqAC1e1Ys

I though Craig did a fairly good job in 3 1/2 minutes. I'll add a few observations of my own. I've discussed this general issue before, but not in reference to ISIS. And I won't repeat everything I've said about OT holy war. 

i) Some people object that if it weren't in the Bible, Christians wouldn't defend OT holy war. That may well be true, although I don't think that's a damning admission. If I weren't a Christian, I'd have lots of shallow, unexamined, unjustified beliefs. And it's not as if an atheist has a superior position. 

ii) If I were making a case against Islam, I wouldn't begin with jihad. Both the Bible and the primary sources of Islam have religiously-sanctioned violence. That's not what distinguishes Christianity from Islam. 

iii) Mind you, that comparison only works at a very abstract level of generality. Violence can be identical in some respects, but morally different. Take a murderer who shoots someone to death and executing a murderer by firing squad. In one respect their identical, but that overlooks fundamental moral differences.

Or compare a schoolyard sniper with a human shield situation. In both cases, innocent children may die, but those are not morally equivalent situations.

Likewise, in war, both sides may use the same weaponry, yet one side may be fighting for a just case while the other side is fighting for an unjust cause. It's not primarily a question of the kind of violence or the objects of violence, but the rationale. A Martian observer, just watching the battle, might think both sides are interchangeable, but that's undiscerning. 

iv) ISIS deliberately practices the most excruciating ways of killing that their fiendish imagination can devise. Exultant sadism. A religious pretext to be get in touch with their inner psychopath.

By contrast, the OT holy war doesn't torture the enemy to death. Although OT holy war is brutal, it doesn't practice cruelty for cruelty's sake.

v) In addition, OT holy war doesn't use violence to spread the faith. This goes to two radically divergent views of conversion.

In Islam, conversion is conformity. It's not a change of belief. When someone converts at gunpoint, they have the same beliefs and attitudes after conversion as they had before conversion. The only change is a different public facade. They feign reverence for the new faith. They say and do whatever is necessary to survive or thrive. 

It's very revealing that Islam values such a thin, perfunctory piety. Just say the right things and do the right things with no corresponding assent.

Compare that to OT piety, with its stress on circumcision of the heart. Or prophetic denunciations of mechanical ritualism. 

In biblical piety, faith is conviction first, and profession second. Not profession without conviction.

In biblical piety, conversion involves a transformation in the convert's entire outlook. A spiritual rebirth. A new heart. Loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.  

vi) That's why the Judeo-Christian faith can never endorse mass conversion, in that externalistic sense. That's why, even though Christianity is a missionary religion, a global religion by design, it is not a religion of world conquest, in the sense of using violence as an evangelistic tool. Coercion is an an instrument of submission, not persuasion. You can't force someone to believe against their will. At best, you can force them to pretend to agree with you. Like extracting a confession under torture. 

Biblical faith abhors mock piety. Abhors pious playacting. In biblical piety, faith proceeds from the inside out. God lights the lantern of the soul, which then radiates outward. 

vii) All these OT cultures were warrior cultures. They practiced military conquest. The Israelites weren't doing anything to the Canaanites that the Canaanites weren't doing to their neighbors, and vice versa. Indeed, the OT laws of warfare are quite restrictive. It's about securing a particular territory, with clearly-defined borders. That's it. 

Are oaths indissoluble

i) According to Biblical ethics, are oaths irrevocable? In the Mosaic law, a father can nullify the oath of a teenage daughter. In that particular respect, the oath is dissoluble. 

It's unclear whether that's because the party is a minor or a female minor. Is it just that she's underage? Or is it that she's still single and living under her father's roof, which puts her under his authority? 

ii) Then there's the famous case of Jephthah's vow. In narrative theology, the narrator will often recount an incident without editorial comment, so it's up to the reader to infer how to view the incident.

Intuitively, it's contradictory to say we ever have a moral duty to do something immoral. In that case, how can we acquire a moral duty to commit a wrong? 

So it seems as though Jephthah should have broken his vow rather than commit murder. It was morally wrong for him to make that vow in the first place. 

This goes to the conventional distinction between lawful and unlawful vows. Still, the account itself is silent on the moral status of his action. Admittedly, this occurs in a book designed to illustrate Israel's reversion to heathen depravity. 

iii) Then there's the difficult case of the Gibeonites, in Josh 9. They hoodwink the Israelites into making a peace treaty. Even after it turns out that the Israelite were snookered, they honor the treaty. 

That's counterintuitive because we normally think a contract entered into under false pretenses voids the contract. Yet God himself backs that treaty (2 Sam 21). 

So is our intuition mistaken, or do special circumstances make this case exceptional?

iv) Josh 9 involves a couple of dilemmas. The Gibeonites find themselves in a bind. They fear annihilation by the Israelites. So they seek a peace treaty. But how can they do so without divulging their identity as the enemy? And once they expose themselves, doesn't that leave them vulnerable to annihilation?

So they resort to subterfuge. It's possible that the treaty is honored in part due to the extenuating circumstances of the dilemma in which they found themselves. That may mitigate what would ordinarily be the culpability of their deception.

v) In addition, they act on faith. They fear Yahweh. So perhaps the treaty is honored, in part or in whole, because their action is a witness to the true God. They were submissive to Yahweh.

This may be similar to Jacob's trickery in Gen 27. Even though it was wrong to fool his father, his action ironically demonstrates a degree of faith, compared to his indifferent brother. Jacob puts his trust in Yahweh's promises. Although his behavior is manipulative, it's still a cut above Esau's casual impiety. 

vi) Finally, the Israelite leadership creates a dilemma for itself by failing to consult Yahweh before sealing the deal (9:14). Either way, they lose face. 

Given the extenuating factors in the account, on both sides, I don't think this case proves that oaths are absolute. 

Circumscribing violence

One of the popular moralistic objections to the Bible concerns the holy war commands and holy war accounts. That's a popular trope among village atheists and "progressive Christians," as well as many OT scholars. My main point is that I think this objection has the issue backwards, but before addressing the main point, a few subsidiary observations:

i) War is brutal. I don't think the reader is expected to find this material uplifting. The ugliness is part and parcel of life in a fallen world.

ii) The hand-wringing and moralizing is a luxury of people who feel safe and secure. People writing in peacetime. 

Not surprisingly, people who find themselves in a war for natural survival are far more hard-nosed. A lot of disapproval heaped on the OT is a reflection of decadent culture elites in gated communities.

Mind you, it can be useful to live at a time and place where we are able to practice critical detachment. I'm not saying that automatically disqualifies the critic. But it also fosters self-deception, as people say things they don't really believe, if they found themselves in a life-and-death struggle. They can talk that way because it's a safe abstraction. They can afford to make disingenuous, unrealistic statements because it doesn't cost them anything. 

iii) Now to my main point: the holy war commands are countercultural. They reflect a dramatic restriction on what is permissible in warfare. 

Historically, many or most cultures, if they had the wherewithal, had no compunction about invading other countries or raiding other tribes for land, women, war captives, loot. They didn't think there was anything wrong with wars of aggression and conquest. Might made right. 

And they invented war gods to rubber-stamped their military campaigns. They just assumed they had divine sanction for military expeditions and raiding parties. 

Likewise, take the glorification of war in the Iliad. For centuries, that was a paradigmatic honor code. An ideal that young men aspired to. 

In the OT, by contrast, God does not endorse war in general. There's defensive war, with rules of warfare. And the only war of conquest was the occupation of Israel. 

So there was a drastic reduction in the kinds of wars deemed to be permissible. Moreover, the enemy was allowed to survive if he submitted to the God of Israel (e.g. Rahab, Gibeonites). So the OT massively curtails the scope of licit violence. 

Transgender squeegee punks

A stock objections to banning the transgendered from the military is that we ought to be grateful for their service to our country. I disagree. 

To begin with, the very fact that transgender members of the military are even using that appeal tells me their motivation for joining wasn't to defend our country, but to use their "service" as leverage to advance their social agenda. I refuse to reward their cynical moral extortion.  

I don't owe transgender soldiers any more gratitude than I owe squeegee bandits. Don't do something I didn't ask you to do, want you to do, or approve of, then pretend you were doing it for me. Don't attempt to put me in your debt against my will. Your emotional coercion is illegitimate.