zenpundit.com

[  by Charles Cameron — this time, the New Testament — this is last of the posts recovered from our down time ]
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In a previous post I described the release of two white doves from the Papal balcony the other day, and the swift response of two other birds, a crow and a seagull, which attacked them.

In that earlier post I chose a quote from Heraclitus by way of contextualizing the event — this time I would like to offer one quote from St Matthew‘s gospel and one from that of St Luke. 

In the circumstances, the quote from Matthew [upper panel] would make it just a tad difficult for Pope Francis to argue, as the secular-minded can, that this was simply the playing out of nature’s way, and not to be interpreted as a sign from God.

I offer the second quote [lower panel], from Luke’s account of Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to be circumcized, by way of contrast, since the concept of sacrificing birds to God is now as improbable to the secular mind as the concept that God takes separate and particular care over the life of every bird that flies…

The Pope was not, I am sure, intending to offer the two doves as sacrifices. Nor did he see them as symbolic of the future fate of the Ukraine to the point of prophecy: the attack was not an omen, a mark of fate, as some have interpreted it.

From which it follows that the gesture was a gesture of peace, of hope — and that the Pope takes his Master’s words, “not a sparrow falls” as a metaphor for the ubiquity of divine grace and mercy, not as a proposition in dogmatic logic.

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The Washington Post, in a piece titled The papal peace doves are the perfect metaphor for Pope Francis’s first year, offers us both the gentle gesture and the harsh response, reporting:

Pope Francis called for peaceful dialogue in Ukraine on Sunday, concluding his remarks by having adorable Italian children release two white doves from the window of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The magical and touching symbol was quickly attacked by the harsh reality of bird-on-bird violence, with one seagull and one black crow attacking the doves. The crowd, inspired and blessed only moments earlier, watched in helpless horror as the crow and gull pecked and pulled at the doves.

National Geographic, in a piece titled Why Birds Attacked the Peace Doves in Rome and subtitled “A crow and a gull targeted the freakish doves, bred to be unnaturally white”, added insight from the natural sciences:

Are doves really peaceful? Not particularly. They have weak feet and small bills and mostly mind their own business, walking around eating seeds and the occasional tiny bug. But they’re just as likely to fight each other over territory (with lots of wing-slapping) as any other species. I once saw a mourning dove chase a blue jay away from a bird feeder. No wimpy bird gets the best of a blue jay.

Why were these doves white? Because white symbolizes peace, purity, serenity, and other good stuff. But here’s the thing: There are no pure-white doves in the natural world. The ones that were released were the result of hundreds of years of domestication and breeding, creating these freakishly white birds for use as pets, and for release at weddings and other ceremonies.

and:

So this wasn’t a sign of the Apocalypse? Hey, I write about nature, not theology. But if I had to bet on whether this is the End of Times or just a couple of predatory birds doing what they do naturally, I’d choose the second as more likely.

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But it would be churlish of me to leave you on such a note. Instead, I invite you to recall this story of St Francis, whose name the present Pope took, from the Little Flowers of St Francis, an early compendium of hagiographical tales about the saint:

A certain young man having caught one day a great number of doves, as he was to sell them he met St Francis, who always felt a great compassion for such gentle animals; and, looking at the doves with eyes of pity, he said to the young man: “O good man, I entreat thee to give me those harmless birds, emblems in Scripture of humble, pure, and faithful souls, so that they may not fall into cruel hands, which would put them to death.”

And the young man, inspired by God, immediately gave them to St Francis, who, placing them in his bosom, addressed them thus sweetly: “O my little sisters the doves, so simple, so innocent, and so chaste, why did you allow yourselves to be caught? I will save you from death, and make your nests, that you may increase and multiply, according to the command of God.”

Then St Francis made nests for them all, and they began to lay their eggs and hatch them in presence of the brethren, and were as familiar and as tame with St Francis and the friars as if they had been hens brought up amongst them, nor did they ever go away until St Francis had given them his blessing.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

At The Bridge, Victor Allen pontificates on R2P (“Responsibility to Protect“) as if it were an established, cardinal point of international  law and not a pet theory of a few years vintage pushed by a small but politically connected clique of Western elite activists.

Strong State, Weak State:The New Sovereignty and Responsibility to Protect 

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine represents a leap forward in accountability for states and does not infringe upon their sovereignty, as states are no longer held to be completely self-contained entities with absolute power over their populations. 

As far as premises go, the first point is highly debatable; the second is formally disputed by *many* states, including Russia and China, great powers which are permanent members of the UN Security Council; and the third bears no relation to whether a military intervention is a violation of sovereignty or not. I am not a self-contained entity either, that does not mean you get to forcibly enter my house.

That R2P does not violate sovereignty stems from the evolution of sovereignty from its Westphalian form in the mid 17th century to the “sovereignty as responsibility” concept advanced by Deng, et al. Modern sovereignty can no longer be held to give states carte blanche in their internal affairs regardless of the level of suffering going on within their borders.

Academic theorists do not have the authority to override sovereign powers (!) constituted as legitimized, recognized, states and write their theories into international law – as if an international covenant like the Geneva Convention had just been contracted. Even persuading red haired activist cronies of the American president and State Department bureaucrats to recite your arguments at White House press conferences does not make them “international law” either – it makes them “policy” – and that only of a particular administration.

Nor did the legal principle of non-interference in another sovereign state’s internal affairs ever mean carte blanche in diplomatic practice. States always could and did take military action in self-defense when disorders in neighboring states threatened their security or spilled over their border outright. They could also choose to recognize insurgents in a neighboring state as lawful belligerents or even grant them diplomatic recognition as the legitimate government.

The rest of the piece continues on in this fashion.

This kind of breezy overselling of R2P, given the exceptionally slender diplomatic reeds on which it is based, is a cornerstone of R2P advocacy, usually for ill-considered or astrategic interventions motivated by “do something!”

[  by Charles Cameron — within the Vatican, feathers fly — a second post posted at our zenpuditry site during our recent downtime ]

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Children, at the side of Pope Francis, release doves in a symbolic prayer for peace in the Ukraine:

What happens next is seen in the lower panel — an almost heraldic battle of the birds, black crow against white dove. Consider, then, war and peace, as they are embodied here.

Heraclitus it was who observed,

What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife.

[ by Charles Cameron ]
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This post, the first of several at our temporary Zenpunditry.Wordpress backup site — make a note of the URL — while ZP itself was down for a week, also contained an announcement of that problem, now no longer required.
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I don’t have anything earth-shattering to report by way of an immanent apocalypse, but my interest in form got nicely tweaked yesterday when I finished watching the movie of Faulkner‘s As I lay Dying — which uses a lot of split screen work that reminded me of my collection of DoubleQuotes in the Wild…

But anyway, I was saying…

I finished the film, stunned and impressed, and went to look see if I could find a copy of the book (I thought it was a short story) online, and came across what to me is the most exquisite short paragraph devoted to form — the second para in As I Lay Dying —

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.

Such awesome beauty there, squaring the circle, circling the square — and for me, the recollection too of John Donne doing a similar rounded squaring:

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go…

Such exquisite geometries both great writers offer us.

I suggest it’s because they have an eye for form — they look or the shapes, the patterns in things — they’re constantly scanning, constantly practicing pattern-recognition.

Which as you know, is an desirable cognitive skill in analytic work — one of the way to connect the dots.

[ by Charles Cameron — consider my mind once again blown, but not at all surprised ]
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You may or may not all have seen this — I don’t watch TV, so such things only reach me if they crop up in my usually pristine Twitter feed — but here is a quick update from the intersection of News and Worthy. It’s like a Freudian slip — or what William Burroughs called “naked lunch” — the moment when you see all too clearly what’s on the end of your fork.
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The news media, my friends, aren’t biased “left” or “right”. I mean, they may be and in fact are, but that’s not the only bias. The bias I’m seeing here is in favor of the superficial over the serious, it’s pervasive, and it’s beautifully captured in this short video.

This bias is obvious, we all know it so well that it’s easy to miss. But it’s also a leading indicator of the advertiser-popularity-media loop, and is to be taken seriously.

And if you know, you know, you already know, and are ready for the occasional laugh — put @KimKierkegaard on your own Twitter feed, for “philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian”.

Double or quits?