[Peace-discuss] the mome raths outgrabe

Thu Oct 4 03:46:55 UTC 2012

"BEAMISH" is clever (and Carrollian) for light bulbs.

And you may well be right about the winning argument against war, but when the intellectual argument for it is a pack of lies ('You're nothing but a pack of cards!'), it seems important to point out that it's thoroughly mimsy, whatever the borogoves might say...

On Oct 3, 2012, at 10:19 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:

> It's popular in China to put English words or English-like words on product brand names, signs and on T-shirts.  Some of it is incomprehensible alphabet soup, some it sort of like Anglicized dog Latin, and occasionally there are some interesting neologisms (QUIEK brand Jam which surely was intended to be "Quick") and naive malapropisms of direct translation ("Don't piss on the floor.") or unbridled optimism  ("This is the most comfortable notebook you have ever run into.  You will feel like writing with it all the time.")
> 
> I had ordered seven OPPLE brand light bulbs at the hardware store which they put in a nice polycloth bag for me.  I noticed later that the bag was advertising another brand of light bulb called BEAMISH.
> 
> In regard to the outgribing, it seems that the winning argument against the war is not always an intellectual one but rather an emotional compassionate appeal to mercy.   The standard preventative measure is to dehumanize the enemy.  It's harder to discredit the sorrow of war.
> 
> How ever much it may be that the gyring and gimbling slithy 1% is running the show, they are still doing it in the name of the 99%, which seems to be sufficient cause for a lot of ufflish thought and frumious outgribing.
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/4/2012 8:12 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>> 
>> The whole article is worth reading, even if it perhaps minimizes our responsibility, as citizens of a putative democratic republic, for US aggression over the last 25 years.   
>> 
>> (Although I did enjoy reading about Charles Maier, whom I knew slightly, recommending a New Republic article; our intellectual enemies are not well-armed.) 
>> 
>>  • Mome rath: Humpty Dumpty says following the poem, "A 'rath' is a sort of green pig: but 'mome" I'm not certain about. I think it's short for 'from home', meaning that they'd lost their way". Carroll's notes ... state: "a species of Badger [which] had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag [and] lived chiefly on cheese." Explanatory book notes comment that 'Mome' means to seem 'grave' and a 'Rath' is "a species of land turtle. Head erect, mouth like a shark, the front forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees, smooth green body, lived on swallows and oysters." In the 1951 animated film adaptation of the book's prequel, the mome raths are depicted as small, multi-colored creatures with tufty hair, round eyes, and long legs resembling pipe stems.
>>  • Outgrabe: Humpty says " 'outgribing' is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle". Carroll's book appendices suggest it is the past tense of the verb to 'outgribe', connected with the old verb to 'grike' or 'shrike', which derived 'shriek' and 'creak' and hence 'squeak'...
>> 
>> --CGE
>> 
>> On Oct 3, 2012, at 1:49 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Tom Woods is a nice guy.  Here he writes about how he
>>> went from being a war spectator to a principled opponent of war.
>>> Read the full text " I Was Fooled by the War-Makers"
>>> at http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1206e.asp
>>> 
>>> excerpt:
>>> 
>>> The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first U.S. conflict of my college career. During the months-long U.S. military buildup in the Gulf known as Operation Desert Shield I eagerly promoted the mission to anyone foolish enough to listen.
>>> 
>>> When war came, it was swift and decisive. Very few American casualties were suffered, while the Iraqi forces were destroyed. Some 100,000 were burned alive by a chemical agent or buried alive in the desert while making a retreat.
>>> 
>>> Believe it or not, that actually bothered me, in spite of how voracious a consumer of war propaganda I was. No one defended Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which he launched in response to that country’s slant oil drilling, but was the outcome of the Persian Gulf War not a terrible tragedy for the Iraqi people — virtually none of whom had had anything to do with Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision — all the same? A far poorer country than ours suddenly had a lot more widows and orphans, not to mention a great many civilian deaths to grieve over and much destruction to repair.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Lopsided counts
>>> 
>>> Mothers and fathers were crying themselves to exhaustion over children they had lost, or who, worse still, were dying agonizing deaths before their very eyes. There is no worse anguish for parents than to watch their children suffer and to be helpless to do anything about it.
>>> 
>>> Was it really right that we Americans should meanwhile be celebrating with a Bob Hope special, and — on cue — flattered by the ceaseless reminders that ours was the awesomest country ever?
>>> 
>>> It later transpired that the Kuwaiti government had hired a public-relations firm in the United States to sell the idea of military invasion to the American people. We later learned that the major atrocity story — that Iraqi troops had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and thrown them onto hospital floors — had been a fraud: the emotional young woman who testified to that effect in Washington turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.
>>> 
>>> Although I had strongly favored military action by the U.S. government from the start, in the wake of George H.W. Bush’s declaration of victory I could not stop thinking about the lopsided casualty counts, the waves of killing rained down on a ramshackle army facing the greatest military machine in the world. Now these were soldiers, not civilians, so by the logic of war I was supposed to hate them or at least not care about them, their deaths being cause for celebration rather than regret.
>>> 
>>> I was having trouble doing that.
>>> 
>>> I went to see my European history professor, Charles Maier, to discuss my misgivings about the war. Maier, a liberal in the New Republic mold, suggested I read a recent article in that magazine making the case for the war. I did, and (believe it or not) that helped to suppress any contrary thoughts for a while.
>>> 
>>> I was already beginning to read libertarian literature by the early 1990s because of my support for the market economy. My reading of the economic works of Murray Rothbard led inevitably to his philosophical works. The Rothbard essay “War, Peace, and the State” leaves an impression on the mind one can never quite shake.
>>> 
>>> Rothbard famously observed that one could uncover the libertarian position on X by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out the state action in question. If thugs can’t just grab your money, for instance, neither can a well-dressed group of thugs calling itself “the state.”
>>> 
>>> “War, Peace, and the State” takes that analysis and applies it to war. If you steal my TV, I can take it back from you. But I may not walk down the street firing a gun every which way and harming third parties in order to make you surrender my TV. Likewise, even assuming a warmaking state to be absolutely in the right, it has no greater moral entitlement to harm third parties in pursuit of its ends than a private individual does.
>>> 
>>> Simply because some politician utters the word “war,” we have been conditioned to believe it just and good that the rights of everyone within the confines of an arbitrary border are abruptly cancelled. What would in any other circumstance be murder and atrocity becomes an antiseptic matter of public policy.
>>> 
>>> The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon-to-be U.S. secretary of State, declared that the price of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s had been “worth it.” Note that she did not dispute the figure. She looked the interviewer in the eye and said that the deaths of half a million kids were worth it in pursuit of one man she and her colleagues didn’t like.
>>> ...
>>> 
>>> One of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies is the “we are the government” line. It makes the subject population somewhat more compliant than it might be if a particular family passed down the power to govern from one generation to another, with no chance (short of outright revolution) that anyone else will ever hold the reins of power. More important, criticisms of their government’s foreign policy now come to be seen as personal affronts. We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize “our” foreign policy!
>>> 
>>> For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic, eliminate the pronoun “we” from their vocabulary. “We” did not kill those Iraqi kids. In 2002 and 2003 “we” did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat posed by a devastated Iraq. “We” did not lay waste to an already-suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing four million others.
>>> 
>>> They did this. The American political class. We did not.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
> 

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