Looks like some people in Syria miss Bush... :D

Michale
256

Be unchivalrous, and you're still a member of that class. You might have your prospects downgraded a couple notches, but you'd normally be ok. It's a culture, so if you deviate from it you're eccentric.

Be dishonorable as a member of the lower orders of society, and you could be in real trouble. It's a code, so if you deviate from it you've committed the kind of act that people do something about.

The planter aristocracy had ersatz chivalry: although military service was highly regarded, and they produced a disproportionate number of our history's military leaders, they were not essentially a military class. It wasn't the basis of their claim on society. They were land- and slave-owners with a tradition of military service, not cavalry paid in land and peasants.

The planter aristocracy had genuine honor. They were a violent lot, in their pastimes and in how they extracted economic value from their principal assets, as well as in their social relations. They needed and had powerful controls on that violence.

Well, we know that he had a hand in uniting Daffy with Bin Laden..

Bush had more of a hand in uniting Bin Laden with the afterworld...

Kim Jong?? Stroke of luck..

Get it?? "STROKE" of luck?? :D yuk yuk yuk

I'll be here all week, be sure and tip your waitresses... :D

Michale
247

Honor is what regulates the fighting of duels. In an honor-based social system, if someone slaps you with a glove (or whatever the signal is in that particular system), you either fight them or defer to them on whatever was at issue.

Of course, if you're both strong and honorable, honor also demands that you not abuse that deference. You can't just be a bully. It wouldn't be honorable. If you try it, you lose honor and then you're in big trouble.

But when a dispute is a matter of honor, i.e. something that prevailing norms say you can insist on up to the point of fighting over it, then the weak are in a position of having to knuckle under.

For the most part, we don't fight duels any more. But if an ethos is properly to be designated as "honor", that means it has roots in a system that limited and legitimized some form of fighting (or substitute for fighting, especially at later stages of the development of such systems) short of total war.

Honor is a thread in the heritage of all cultures: bullying is a possibility wherever and whenever there are people, and in the absence of something like a modern police force, you need norms to contain and limit it. Such norms succeed best when they limit the abuse of strength as much as possible but no more. If the strongest 49% have nothing to lose by subverting prevailing norms and nothing to gain by upholding them, those norms won't prevail for long. There has to be something in it for the potential bully.

Or, in the case of a scumbag like Andy Jackson who knew how to play the system, the actual bully. The planter aristocracy he represented was stuffed to button-popping with honor.

He is uniting all of the enemies of the United States...

I don't think he had any hand in "uniting" Kim Jong-Il with bin Laden and Qaddafi.

My only beef with the Left in general (and even some Weigantians) is that everyone scoffed at the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was actually anything to worry about..

The Left just dismissed such talk as Right Wing fear mongering...

Well, look who turned out to be right (no pun intended... :D) about things...

Michale
246

Oh yes... Egypt is turning out SO well...

Too bad no one had the prescience to state that things in Egypt would go very south very fast, despite on the PollyAnna-iums coming from the Obama Administration.

Oh wait...

Someone did.. :D

Next up to become an Islamic State... LIBYA....

Obama is quite the uniter....

He is uniting all of the enemies of the Unite States...

Michale
245

Really? Where did you get that? I've never known anyone in my life that I considered honorable to DEMAND or even vigorously ask that another honorable person defer to strength.

I think that's what DSWS meant...

The way I took it is that the honorable would never demand yada yada yada...

Might have been a typo on DSWS's part...

Michale
244

Ya'all might want to mark this day on your calenders..

I am in COMPLETE agreement with Matt on this..

Libya showed unequivocally that Air Power by itself will do nothing but destroy targets...

W/O boots on the ground, Air Power is simply blowing shit up..

Matt,

Those Arab youth riding to battle with Justin Bieber on their iPods don't want a more fundamentalist regime that will take their Metallica and Lady Gaga away. They just don't. Not while they're painting Man'O'War album covers on walls in Tripoli.

Yea and the Egypt revolution was all about goodness and light and freedom and democracy..

Until it wasn't..

dsws,

Honor isn't nationalism. It's an ethos (tightly bound with gender identity) that keeps the strong from picking on the weak-but-honorable, demands that the weak-but-honorable defer to the strong, and prescribes rather unpleasant treatment for the dishonorable.

Well said...

Michale
241

"... tightly bound with gender identity ...)

Really? You actually said that? Do you mean that you can tell which Marines belive Semper Fidelis and which Marines that don't can be seen by whether they stand or sit as they pee???

Or are you saying that men and women who prefer same sex can't be honorable?

"Demands that the weak-but-honorable defer to the strong ..."

Really? Where did you get that? I've never known anyone in my life that I considered honorable to DEMAND or even vigorously ask that another honorable person defer to strength.

Dsws, you've either got a very strange definition of honor or you've totally mis-written on that post.

Honor isn't nationalism. It's an ethos (tightly bound with gender identity) that keeps the strong from picking on the weak-but-honorable, demands that the weak-but-honorable defer to the strong, and prescribes rather unpleasant treatment for the dishonorable.

Is doing what your party wants you to do what makes for "best politician"?

Maybe.

Or maybe it's just a sign of the tail wagging the dog.

Traditional Republicans like Boehner are quickly becoming extinct (or Democrats) as the monied interests figure out how to unelect them if they aren't fringe enough.

Still, credit where credit is due on picking someone who makes us think about what it means to be "best politician".

-David

Those Arab youth riding to battle with Justin Bieber on their iPods don't want a more fundamentalist regime that will take their Metallica and Lady Gaga away. They just don't. Not while they're painting Man'O'War album covers on walls in Tripoli.

If you want to understand the Libyan uprising, start with the flags. They showed up early, often, and everywhere, demonstrating a remarkable unity of purpose -- and a sense of national identity. If by "honor" you mean Libyans with pride of country, then sure. Revenge? There's some of that too. No regime like Ghadafi's can be in power for 40+ years without engendering at least a little bit of resentment.

As far as ethnic or sectarian tensions: Ghadafi had spent the last four decades playing tribes and ethnic groups against one another, so he was reaped exactly what he'd sown. One need look no further than the Berber tribesmen South of Tripoli, who pressed on against him week after week with grim determination, for an example. Their fight had everything to do with Ghadafi's very official and longtime oppression.

So it isn't that we don't understand Libyan motives, it's that all those motives you mention are part of the whole picture -- but none is the whole picture by itself.

You won't hear the line "airpower alone never wins wars" much in Washington anymore, one assumes, after the spectacularly quick victory by an untrained group of rebels in combination with high-tech precision bombing by the allies.

In fact, Libya is the perfect demonstration that air power cannot win wars all by itself and maneuver on the ground is essential to victory. In Libya, the maneuver elements were simply made up of Libyans instead of Western troops.

There was a question whether local forces would be able to coordinate attacks, plan offensives, etc., no matter how much air power NATO used. Of course, that question was resoundingly answered in the affirmative when Libyans used Zodiac boats and cobbled-together armor to take Tripoli from three directions -- proving that Arabs are quite capable of wanting their freedom enough to fight and die for it.

For whom, exactly?

Tip O'Neill
Jim Wright
Nancy Pelosi
NEWT GINGRICH
Sam Rayburn

Nah, this time, with all due respect (hehehehehehe), you missed it.

I still say Boehner, because the cats in the House are a lot harder to herd than the Senate felines. Of either party, now that I think about it.

Boehner did what his party wanted him to do, which was mostly "just say no". The Democrats only very occasionally managed to split them when it came to vote, so I stand by Boehner as Best Politician.

And, yeah, that's GOT to be Photoshopped...

-CW

Still, its out there and like pictures of kittens, puppies and baby seals ... it gets passed around.

I don't know how it could get worse than this ... maybe if it was Rick Santorum rather than Rick Perry?

http://saintpetersblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/perry-rick-corndog2.jpg

Controlling the R's in the Senate has to be like herding cats. And noone can say that he hasn't done it IN SPADES.

2 years of almost total domination of 40+ powerful politicians? Magic. Pure Politics.

pull his own legislation because he couldn't get his party to vote for it?

Or maybe the guy who couldn't get it right a SECOND time?

Is this the same guy who couldn't get the Balanced Budget Amendment passed? You know, the one that was previously passed?

The same guy who couldn't get DISASTER relief passed?

And you think this is a good politician because????

"There can be only one."

Kudos on the movie quote... :D

Michale
236

Winner -- I was just going to give it to the rebels, but then the rebels couldn't have done it alone.

thanking all the folks who made victory possible is what the acceptance speech is for ;)

hey, c'mon, Japan's ONE country, right?

i figured that might be the reasoning, but i guess i read the award titles as being more specific than a whole country. if a similar disaster hit Seattle, would we award the category to the entire United States?

Boring -- I tried to pick one, but I fell asleep, sorry... (heh).

ha, that's the aforementioned scenario where one lets the cat choose...

Assad would be first on my list, but [snip]

no but should be necessary. as for the other dictators, it's an honor just to be nominated :)

OWS i suppose deserves a pass, but that still leaves 3 total punts and 3 that are a bit sketchy. the other thing these awards need, what really makes an award is a cool nickname. the film academy awards are called oscar, year-end awards is already mclaughlin's thing, so what shall we call these?

In my defense...

Winner -- I was just going to give it to the rebels, but then the rebels couldn't have done it alone. This was a truly joint effort, so I see it as a single military offensive.

Loser -- hey, c'mon, Japan's ONE country, right?

Most Defining -- OK, guilty as charged. I couldn't make up my mind on that one.

Boring -- I tried to pick one, but I fell asleep, sorry... (heh).

Stagnant -- This one deserved a "class" award, because there are (sadly) so many deluded dictators. Assad would be first on my list, but I had to make it generic.

Worst Photo -- Guilty as charged. My gut told me go with the drone, but I thought it might have just been the bias of how recent it was.

Capitalist -- nobody's name is on the bank account, it's a group thing, which is why OWS is a single entity for this one.

So... not counting "Enough Already" (where we ALWAYS give multiple awards), that leaves me by my count as having punted on 3, maybe 4 if you count "dictators" against me. That's still not that bad, considering we had 20 awards in Part 1.

:-)

-CW

Do you see where i'm going with this? Come on now, CW; what's with all the cop-out multiple and collective award winners? i mean one or two i can understand, but the whole point of handing out awards is that among the nominees, whoever does the choosing needs to CHOOSE. in the case of a tie perhaps the cat could be consulted ;)

or as the highlander says:

"There can be only one."