Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 As everyone likely now knows, the US President has a plan to make the Gaza strip into a sort of French Riviera, a high-value vacation destination.  There will surely be lots of Trump properties there in this imagined future. There won't be a lot of Palestinians, though. The displaced people of Gaza will get some other nice place to live, but won't get to go back to Gaza.   They've been displaced before.  They must be used to it by now.  Amirite?  Donald Trump says the United States will "own" Gaza. I put quote marks around that word because he is not thereby saying Gaza will come under US sovereignty.  He is saying the US will own it -- ownership and sovereignty are two distinct facts. It is possible he has in mind Israeli sovereignty, and US ownership within Israeli law. If the hotels make money, Israel will have to be cut in with "a piece of the action," as grifters like to say.  Anyway: this imagined future is as likely to be the actual ...

Lara Logan is in the news again.  In the early years of this millennium, LL seemed to be on a path to a great career as a television journalist. She was with CBS, for gawd's sake. Its news division has given the world Murrow and Cronkite. It is presumably where a young woman or man with ambitions in that line wants to be. In 2011, as the Mubarak government collapsed in Egypt, as crowds filled up the streets of Cairo, CBS sent Logan and a camera crew to cover this huge story for them.    This is where our story turns ugly.  Soon after Mubarak's resignation, Logan was raped by a rowdy celebratory crowd that may have included up to 300 men. She was rescued by soldiers and flown home where she was hospitalized for four days.  On a message board to which I was contributing with some regularity at the time, I remember one commenter saying that he disagreed with news coverage of the attack. He thought the mainstream media ought to shut up about Logan. said he thought i...

Another timeline. I'm soon going to string all these together into one big mega-post that will speak to history, pre-history, and evolutionary biology beginning around 63 million years ago.  Right now we're looking at the late Bronze Age, the period from 4000 to 2000 BC.  I'm going to use "BC" rather than BCE here, for no better reason than that the AP style guide approves of it.  On second thought, I won't use BC or BCE here. I'll just assume you, dear reader, know that is what is meant in each of the (always approximate) years provided. So ... here we go. 4000 -- farming settlements first established in the Indus River Valley.  Another point around this time: horses have begun to be domesticated on the Eurasian steppes, modern-day Ukraine and west Kazakhstan. 3600 -- in the land between the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris, i.e. Sumer, copper begins to be mixed with tin to create Bronze, giving this era a name.  3500 -- the desertification of much of no...

Coptic Christians are in the news again, as targets of violence in Egypt. I'll just use today's post as a convenient format for leaving interested readers three links to sources for reading up on the history of the Copts. First, a basic encyclopedic discussion: http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/I-Intro/chapter1.html Second, an admiring account of Coptic Christianity as the vessel that has preserved the Christian faith "in its earliest and purest form." http://www.coptic.net/articles/CoptsThroughTheAges.txt Finally, a discussion (by an evangelical-Protestant source) of a key distinction between Coptic Christianity and western Protestant Christianity. https://www.gotquestions.org/Coptic-Christianity.html That key distinction is: Miaphysitism. "Belief in mixed nature." Whereas the Chalcedon Creed of AD 451 declared that Christ was and is one person with two natures, both fully human and fully divine, the Copts, who di...

The day before yesterday, I quoted a review in the New York Review of Books, for June 4th. Today I will do likewise. Again with the caveat that I haven't read the book and likely never will. The book in question this time is READING DARWIN IN ARABIC, 1860-1950 by Marwa Elshakry. What a marvelous title! so resonant (whether by intent or not) of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN. Anyway, the Ekshakry book is reviewed by Christopher de Bellaigue. He tells us, on Elshakry's authority,  that the Arabic term for Darwinism is "Darwiniya," and that in many quarters, especially in Egypt, it was a key part of modernizing/westernizing movements for decades. He ends his review this way: "Darwiniya is not only a scientific system, but also a shorthand for intellectual curiosity and a progressive view of the human condition. The reverses it has suffered over the past few years are less bad than they look, not only because modern values are espoused by a great number of Mulsims,...

May 6th was the 158th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. In commemoration thereof, here is a lengthy and fascinating quotation from Freud's Moses , a book written by a professor of Jewish History, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and published in 1993. The bit I'm about to quote is simply Yerushalmi's summary of Freud's views on Moses, without at this point any editorial comment by Yerushalmi (or by me). It is, I think, a remarkable example of a commentator who did a better job of describing Freud's views on this point than Freud himself ever managed. Monotheism is not of Jewish origin but an Egyptian discovery.  The pharaoh Amenhotep IV established it as his state religion in the form of an exclusive worship of the sun-power, or Aton, thereafter calling himself Ikhnaton.  The Aton religion ... was characterized by the exclusive belief in one God, the rejection of anthropomorphism, magic, and sorcery, and the absolute denial of an afterlife.  Upon Ikhnato...

I'm continuing my discussion of Satlow's book, from yesterday's blog entry. "The father of Hellenistic ethnography was Hecataeus of Abdera. A Greek working for Alexander's general and successor, Ptolemy I Soter (367-283 BCE), Hecataeus wrote a comprehensive account of the Egyptians....Hecataeus's Aegyptiaca influenced generations of later Greek ethnographers. Aegyptiaca contains an excursus on the Judeans, whom he identified as a distinct polity centered in Jerusalem ("Hieroslyma") and ruled primarily by priests." Hecataeus was interested in the "politeia" of the Judeans. This Greek word, sometimes transliterated "politics" or translated "constitution" is wider than either of those terms. It means, "the social system" or "the laws" if that term is quite broadly understood. A little later, Satlow tells us that Hecataeus was "aware of, and maybe consulted, a written source that he...

On August 14th, the vice president of Egypt resigned that post after just one month in office. With everything else that is going on in Egypt, this didn't get a lot of attention in the U.S. The crowds in the streets get attention, the killing to clear protest camps, even the imminent release of former president Mubarak. These things  get attention.. But ElBaradei? Meh. This is important, though, because this particular Vice President was an internationally respected name, and critical to the post-Morsi government's hopes of receiving broad recognition of its legitimacy. Regular readers will recall that I made the same point at the time ElBaradei became VP (something of a lateral move from that of prime minister.) As I noted then, ElBaradei is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In that position he was appropriately skeptical of American claims about weapons of mass destruction in either Iraq or Iran, but he took a...

For three days last week the new prime minister of Egypt was the fellow named in the headline of this entry. ElBaradei was appointed to that post by the interim president, Adly Mansour, who until quite recently was  Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. But on Tuesday, President Mansour shuffled the playing cards of his very new and tenuous government. It appears ElBaradei is now going to be vice president (and it isn't at all clear what that title is going to mean), and the new prime minister designate is the former finance minister Hazem el-Beblawi. Anyway, the significance of ElBaradei's involvement, whatever exactly its contours, is that he is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In that capacity he was skeptical of US (Bush administration) claims about weapons of mass destruction in either Iraq or Iran, but he took a hard line on the subject of North Korea, saying "I see a very serious crisis -- a country that's ...