{"id":28421,"date":"2013-09-30T04:12:28","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T04:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28421"},"modified":"2013-09-30T06:10:43","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T06:10:43","slug":"brief-note-and-new-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28421","title":{"rendered":"Brief Note and New Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

Working on a number of things, top priority among which is a cross-post for Nuclear Diner<\/a><\/strong> about the Myhrvold Report<\/a><\/strong> that Cheryl Rofer<\/strong> decisively shredded here last week<\/a>. Cheryl and I have done some point-counterpoint and blogging \u00a0round tables together in the past but, this time I have been handicapped in my response by being largely in agreement \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0I will try to hit the report from a somewhat different angle but like Cheryl I have some serious reservations.<\/p>\n

Picked up a few new reads this weekend that should be interesting to the readership:<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

Confronting the Classics<\/strong> <\/a>by Mary<\/a>\u00a0Beard<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dirty Wars<\/strong> <\/a>by Jeremy<\/a> Scahill<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mary Beard is a British celebrity classicist from King’s College<\/strong>, an eminent figure in the field and extremely active in the social media realm where her blog, A Don’s Life<\/strong> <\/a>and her twitter account <\/a>are highly popular. She seems somewhat leftish anti-American in her politics, but does not appear to be under what Popper termed “the spell of Plato” and regards Socrates as a radical and subversive ( which he was, though not quite in the modern sense of those words). \u00a0Here is a sample of Beard’s prose:<\/p>\n

Marcus Tullius Cicero was murdered on 7 December 43 BC: Rome’s most famous orator, off-and-on defender of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cicero of course shared the fate of Demosthenes, dying less ignobly than Pompey but much less impressively to his fellow Romans than did the fanatical Cato. As a result, Cato has an equally uncompromising libertarian think tank named in his honor while America’s gift to Cicero’s posterity is only a mafia-infested Chicago suburb.<\/p>\n

Scahill is much better known figure than Beard. I frankly disagree in principle with his take on drones and al Qaida<\/strong> targets – unless they are hors d’ combat or attempting to surrender, as combatants *all* AQ members are legitimate military targets under the laws of war, period – but I wanted to see what his argument was at it’s most expansive and fully documented. Should be an interesting read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] Working on a number of things, top priority among which is a cross-post for Nuclear Diner about the Myhrvold Report that Cheryl Rofer decisively shredded here last week. Cheryl and I have done some point-counterpoint and blogging \u00a0round tables together in the past but, this time I have been handicapped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420,129,133,445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-blogging","category-book","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28421"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28452,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421\/revisions\/28452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}