[NON BLOG] CFTAG Report

[rfmcdonald]

• Seguing from my confession of the shame that I feel as a cultural vandal when I destroy several dozen Anne Rice paperbacks as part of my work, we discussed the various authors who don't take criticism well, if all, and succumb to the temptation to write as many sequels as they want, and why be worried with declining artistic qualities since after all it sells. Frank Herbert and Dune were raised in this connection.


• I brought up René Girard in relation to an audio documentary, CBC Ideas' The Scapegoat. Girard argued that Greek and other ancient mythologies are dominated by a need to find scapegoats--in his reading, entities which receive the full force of the community's fears and legitimized violence. By the time of Oedipus Rex, the boundaries between scapegoat/legitimate violence and non-scapegoat/illegitimate violence necessary for the scapegoat to work properly had collapsed. In Hebrew mythology, the story of Joseph, by showing the possibility for reconciliation if apologies are tendered, challenges this tendency; the dialogues of Job, which end in Job questioning the accuracy of his scapegoating, transform things utterly.


• This, schizmatic related to medieval anti-Semitism, which--by refusing forgiveness to that population deemed guilty of having killed the Christ--can be seen as a throwback. This anti-Semitism also coexisted alongside an academic philo-semitism, where Christian scholars consulted with Jewish rabbis on Hebrew texts. Add to this the near-certainty that the majority of early Jews converted to Christianity and formed the nucleus of Christendom, and the generally tendentious relationship of Judaism's two major successor-religions to their source, and one is hard-pressed to come up with a definitive conclusion.


• Islam, in pre-modern circumstances, is more tolerant of minority religious communities than Western Christendom, again in pre-modern circumstances. This greater degree of toleration might stem from a tolerance for faiths ancestral to Islam, and a lack of emotive theologically-inspired resentments (for instance, Christian resentment of the supposed collective responsibility of Jews for the crucifixion). Islam hasn't been notably tolerant towards successor faiths, such as the Baha'i and the Ahmadiyya.


• Continuing from my previous note about Franco-American cooperation on Lebanon, it's worth noting that left-wingers in the US must feel shocked at France's betrayal of its pacifist internationalism while right-wingers must be shocked at the aggressiveness of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. We've no idea how this would map on the French political spectrum.


• Brief discussion was given to the possibility of Ian Paisley, who in 1988 protested the Pope's address to the European Parliament, going one step further and assassinating Karol Woltyja. To us outsiders, the whole complex of Northern Ireland religious politics is byzantine. Considering that Northern Ireland--the first overseas Anglo-Scottish colony of settlement, really--played such a disproportionate role in the colonization of the Thirteen Colonies, this might explain much about American religious culture.


• The problem with "In the Sea of Time" scenarios--like a lot of deus ex machina science-fiction scenarios--is that they don't take into account the psychological factors that would come into play. If one day you're in, say, mid-1980s Yugoslavia wondering how to pay off the foreign debt and when the collective presidency will kickstart reforms and enjoying your British pop music and American movies, and the next day it's 1939 and German panzers have just crossed the Polish frontier, you'll be befuddled.


• As fun as space operas involving aliens are, barring wonderfully bizarre circumstances--for instance, Turtledove's universe where other alien species develop faster-than-light travel at the same time they develop gunpowder and promptly stagnate--any space opera involving alien contact with Earth will end in our prompt subjugation. Even if Earth was to survive as a neutral border-state, it would not only need to be located on the frontier between two or more empires, but it would need a certain amount of force projection. Siam survived to become Thailand, without southeast Asia's usual post-colonial ills, because the Siamese state was just credible enough to withstand French and British pressure. If we can't go to Mars without spending a sizable percentage of the Earth's GDP, how credible can we be?


• In the latter half of the Cold War, NATO's 1983 ABLE ARCHER exercise may have precipitated a closest brush with a global thermonuclear war, by playing upon the Soviet gerontocracy's fears of a surprise US nuclear attack. The Soviet Union was aggressive, but only within limited boundaries, and generally for purposes viewed by its leadership as defensive. After Stalin, risking everything in an effort at global hegemony didn't really appeal to the Kremlin. Perhaps similarly, the Islamic Republic of Iran's leadership is too strongly vested in the Republic's continued existence to really be interested in, say, smuggling nuclear warheads to terrorists or firing them at Israel. Hopefully.


• One day, when sociologists and historians and members of other related disciplines are able to accurately model the evolution of human societies, we'll have really really good simulation games.