Back in August, I got thoroughly shook when I heard a conversation between Dr. Oz and Ben Shapiro, on the Ben Shapiro show. I have saved my reaction for October, a month when I post about scary things, because Dr. Oz does not seem to realize how scary his plans are.
They are discussing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again-) government initiative. Ben asks about the problem that patients have difficulty getting ahold of their medical records (their “charts”), which makes it difficult to get your information from one specialist to another.
Dr. Oz’s solution, though he doesn’t articulate it in this short, is that each patient chart will exist in a big government database. It will be tied to your social security number, and to “facial recognition, like in airports.” There will also be a big database of MAHA-approved healthcare providers, so these people can have instant access to your patient records. The MAHA bot can recommend to you an approved provider in your area, and, as Dr. Oz forecasts in this short, the MAHA bot can also call your attention to incipient health problems that you may have, and recommend, say, an app to help you lower your blood sugar. And it can tell you not to eat that thing that you’re about to eat. All this, said Dr. Oz on The Ben Shapiro Show, will be “completely optional.”
What could possibly go wrong?
I believe that Dr. Oz has good intentions. He wants to help Americans be healthier, and direct action on this by a massive, centralized government department is the only way he can imagine to get this done.
Whenever we create an awesome new power, we have to game out all the scenarios. We have to imagine not only how it will be used by people with good intentions, but how it could be used by people with bad intentions. Because every awesome new power will fall into the bad-intentioned hands eventually.
So, what could go wrong?
First of all, how long will participation in this system remain optional? And how “optional” will it really be? Will there be any health-care providers who accept patients whose charts haven’t been uploaded into the Leviathan database? Will this system, in fact, make it more difficult to find niche specialists who can help you with your particular problem? Because I gotta say, everyone I know who has become healthier, has done it by using resources outside the official healthcare system.
What happens if an error gets encoded in the official system? We saw this last week, where the diagnostic criteria for Lyme disease were dead wrong. Anyone who wanted to get diagnosed needed to find a rogue doctor. What will we do when Dr. Oz has gotten rid of all the rogue doctors?
Even if you try to opt out, you probably have some former doctors who would willingly turn over their records about you to Leviathan, to be listed next to your face scan and social security number. So you now have a, possibly outdated or incomplete, patient chart that is going to follow you around. Perhaps this chart will include an earlier misdiagnosis, like hysterical hypochondria instead of Lyme disease. Or “drug-seeking behavior” instead of chronic pain.
And how might our bad actors use this chart that is linked to all your other citizen data? Let me count the ways. You could be denied medical care if you don’t comply with a new, untested treatment. (Nevermind. That has never happened before.) Your taxes could go up if you are pre-diabetic; after all, you are costing the taxpayer more money! Never mind that you tried to opt out of Medicaid. You could have your grocery-store purchases restricted (card turned down!) if you try to buy something that the app deems inappropriate for a person of your health status. (These are the same people, recall, who apparently taught us the wrong food pyramid for sixty years.)
And, since this is October, let’s go for the really scary, but still plausible, scenario.
You’re walking down the street in your neighborhood. A drone buzzes up to you, identifies you using face-recognition technology. A friendly little Clippy pops out and chirps,
“Hello! It looks like your blood sugar is high. You have one year to get it down, using this app, or my brother drone will find you and euthanize you in order to save money for the taxpayers.”
I have a friend who, shortly after he was married, came down with a mysterious illness. It was causing fatigue, pain, digestive problems, and a bunch of other debilitating symptoms. This guy is young (or was when he first became sick), handsome, and looks fit. He is not in a demographic that you would expect to have trouble being believed, but he had trouble. He’s been accused of faking. He’s been yelled at by a doctor. He and his wife used up all their money, and the illness made it difficult for him to work his job as a builder. Finally, after years of seeking solutions on their own, outside the traditional medical establishment, my friend found a doctor who was willing to look at his blood under a microscope.
Turns out, he has Lyme disease.
It took him fifteen years to get this diagnosis.
As I found out when I read this book, this sort of experience is not unusual for a Lyme patient.
Let’s start with another Lyme testimony
The author, Kris Newby, and her husband were both bitten by Lyme-bearing ticks while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. It didn’t take them 15 years to get a diagnosis … but the disease did ruin their professional lives, use up all their money, and cause them to search through more than ten doctors.
We had brain fog: we couldn’t think, multitask, or remember simple things. The crushing fatigue continued. Our necks felt like they were locked in a vice-grip. Paul’s symptoms were more muscle and joint related. He didn’t have the strength to lift his leg over a bike or press the trigger of a portable drill. Mine were more neurological. I was no longer capable of reading books aloud to my sons before bedtime … I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year. … One day I found myself at a stoplight unable to remember what the red, yellow, and green lights meant.
Rather than admit defeat, Dr. B decided that I was an attention-seeking, hysterical female whose husband was suffering from sympathy pains. He diagnosed us with a “psychosomatic couples thing.”
I spent weeks pulling strings to get an appointment with another infectious disease specialist, this one at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our first few appointments were with a young physician/fellow whom I’ll call Dr. C. …During my final appointment, Dr. C told me, “You’d have more chance of winning the lottery than both of you getting Lyme disease.” Then he strongly recommended that we both seek psychological counseling for the depression we were experiencing.
Dr. D came in at the end of the appointment, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “Sorry, we don’t have the tools to fix what is wrong with you.” Then he dismissed us as patients.
ibid, pp. 85 – 88
As it turned out, most Lyme ticks are also infected with rickettsia, another tick-borne illness that is even harder to detect than Lyme in a blood test: “If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it.” (231) More in a moment about the reasons for this double infection.
Years later, when Newby had been researching Lyme and rickettsia, she found herself again sitting in front of Dr. D., this time as a journalist rather than a patient.
As I sat in his office, I wondered if he remembered me, but I didn’t mention our previous meeting.
At the end of the meeting, I took a chance and asked him, “Are you screening for any rickettsias?”
He said he didn’t know. The genetic sequencing was being done at Columbia University … Dr. D. opened the study protocol on his laptop and realized there were no rickettsias on the screening list. He said he’d see if rickettsias could be added to the search.
As I got up to leave, he added, “When you came by my clinic before, we weren’t allowed to treat chronic Lyme disease. It was department policy. I’m sorry.”
ibid, pp. 236 – 237
The diagnostic standards: made-up
He was not wrong. The diagnostic standards for Lyme specifically deny that chronic Lyme exists.
In the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.
ibid, p. 121
It gets worse. In preparation for her documentary Under Our Skin, the author put in a FOIA request to obtain emails between CDC employees and IDSA guidelines authors. She got the runaround for five years, so they completed the documentary without it. Eventually, she received 3,000 pages of emails which revealed that “a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease … tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders. ” (124) Furthermore, “part of the group’s stated mission … was to run a covert ‘disinformation war ‘ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists … ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks.'” (123)
This pill is not just red, it’s black
The Jen of ten years ago would have been very skeptical of this kind of expose. It would have struck me as too similar to Marxist conspiracy theories where all the bad stuff in the world is caused by “capitalists,” which means primarily “big corporations,” but then is applied to anybody who doesn’t want socialism. Journalists, and Hollywood movie directors, love their government/big business conspiracies. It’s one of the very few kinds of story that get them going. Ordinarily, when I am presented with a “corrupt capitalists” narrative, I sympathize with the supposed villains of the piece because I know that the authors of the piece, if they knew my views, would probably villainize me just as readily.
However, when it comes to health, the Jen of ten years ago has seen some stuff since that time. I’ve met people with Lyme (my friend above is the most poignant example, but there have been others). I’ve met people, particularly women, who have had an extraordinarily hard time getting autoimmune type physical complaints taken seriously. I’ve even had that happen, on a small scale, to myself.
Then there have been the scandals. The ADD drugs scandal, the depression drugs scandal, the cross-sex hormones scandal, and the one we don’t talk about, which involved financial incentives for drug companies to discredit victims of their product and doctors who tried alternative treatments almost exactly like the incentives in relation to Lyme described in this book.
So yeah, I’m not that Jen anymore. I do think Newby is a little leftie (maybe a lot leftie), but that’s not why she wrote this book. She wrote it because she got Lyme disease and a series of doctors called her crazy.
My friend with Lyme also has a lot of food allergies and substance sensitivities. During You-Know-What, when one of his kids broke an arm, he was worried about bringing her to the hospital, because they might force You-Know-What on her as a condition of treatment. They got the arm treated without a jab; happy ending. But we live in a relatively red state. This is a horrible position to be in: where you’ve basically lost all trust in the people you need for critical care.
And that’s not even the bad part.
The Bad Part
Most of Bitten is neither about IDSA scandal nor about the author’s personal experience with Lyme. Instead, it follows the life of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American scientist. Chapter 2 opens with Willy’s triumph when, in 1981, he discovered spirochetes, similar to those that cause African relapsing fever, inside the midgut of a blacklegged deer tick. Burgdorfer became a hero in the medical and scientific communities after he and his team proved that these tick-borne spirochetes were what was causing the mysterious Lyme disease. He received awards and honorary degrees. (13 – 15)
Willy called his discovery “serendipity,” a happy accident.
Shortly before his death, Willy was videotaped saying that he believed that the outbreak of tick-borne diseases that started around Lyme, Connecticut, had been caused by a bioweapons release. [This] could explain why the condition we call Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose and treat–and why the epidemic is spreading so far and so fast, [but] Willy’s confession was vague and fragmented because he was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease.
ibid, pp. 15 – 17
The book then backs up and starts with Willy’s childhood in Switzerland and his Ph.D. work there on ticks mailed from East Africa which caused relapsing fever and African swine fever. He does a postdoctoral program at the University of Basel (25), then accepts a research position at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever. More ticks! In fact, the biggest tick collection in North America. “The U.S. Public Health Service, which would later be renamed the National Institutes of Health, paid for the lab by developing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines for … diseases transmitted from animal or arthropod vectors to man.” (35) As the chapters roll by, we follow Willy as he falls in love with and marries a fellow scientist who is a U.S. citizen. Already working for the U.S. government during the Cold War, he soon found himself involved in programs testing nerve gasses and biological weapons.
America’s first deployable incapacitating biological weapon was an aerosolized mix of a toxin, a virus, and a bacterium, designed to create a prolonged period of incapacitation across a population. The first component … SEB, was a toxic waste product of the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In three to twelve hours, [victims] would come down with chills, headache, muscle pain, coughing, and a fever as high as 106 F. The second component, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, would, in one to five days, cause a high fever and weakness and fatigue lasting for weeks. The third component, Q fever, would cause debilitating flulike symptoms for weeks to months … Q fever could be chronic and sometimes even fatal.
When exposed to this mass-produced germ cocktail, theoretically, few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission, making an invasion easier. And no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how nonlethal these weapons could be and wryly noted that they would be nonlethal only for someone with two nurses.
ibid, p. 145
In other words, this was a way to bomb civilians without bombing civilians.
In other words, weapons developers were mixing different germs and toxins deliberately and putting them into a form that could be easily spread.
Meanwhile, Willy was force-feeding pathogens to thousands of ticks.
Near the end of his life, Willy was interviewed on video by Tim Grey, an indie filmmaker, who later shared the tape with Newby.
“If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”
“Yeah. It sounds like, throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have …”
Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper … the paper from 1952?”
In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds–an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.
ibid, pp. 100 – 101
So now you know why I’m blackpilled when it comes to “science” and “medicine” and the NIH. This is why Lyme is going around ruining people’s lives. Because it was designed to.
Black-pilled, but still not a hippie
The book closes, as all hippie books must, with the obligatory chapter blaming Western colonialism.
Big Hole [Montana] was the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce. … U.S. soldiers ambushed them while they were sleeping. The Nez Perce lost eight-nine people, mostly women and children, and the U.S. soldiers lost twenty-nine, with an additional forty injured.
Two months later, Chief Joseph surrendered.
The Native Americans who used to live here understood that they were part of nature, not the overlords of all living things.
When the white settlers arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, they clear-cut the trees around Hamilton for their houses, railroad ties, and mine shafts. This fostered the overgrowth of brush, which led to a proliferation of small mammals, the blood meal hosts for the wood ticks that carry Rickettsia rickettsi. The spotted fever epidemic at the turn of the last century was fueled by this disruption of a previously balanced ecosystem.
ibid, pp. 245 – 247
Now, you know that I have a special interest in American Indians, and feel as much sympathy for them as anybody. And just for the record, I am against the massacre of civilians. That said, it is ridiculous to imply that the settling of North America by Europeans is responsible for the existence of the Lyme epidemic, or of disease in general.
It is a fact of history that people groups move, expand, colonize, and kill each other. And as a result of these people movements, ecology changes, and new diseases spread or become prominent. All this is true. It does not follow that, before any given people movement, the ecosystem was perfectly “balanced,” or that there was no disease and no death. There would have been different causes of death, different diseases, and different wars. The Anasazi, for example, were severely malnourished. The Aztecs were systematically wiping out all the other peoples in central Mexico. Montana was not Eden. It’s a fallen world.
Rather than blaming the U.S. soldiers who killed the Nez Perce for the Lyme epidemic, let’s blame them for what they actually did; namely, killing the Nez Perce. And call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I feel that the blame for the Lyme epidemic should fall on the Cold War era government bioweapons bureaucrats and scientists who actually infected ticks with Lyme and rickettsia, and apparently allowed them to escape somewhere on Long Island. I feel that Occam’s Razor would lead us to point towards them as the culprits, rather than to something big and vague like colonialism. Just a thought.
And I do blame them. Despite my semi-defense of colonialism as the way of the world, no, I do not think it’s a good idea to create a cocktail of infectious agents that result in chronic, debilitating, hard-to-diagnose disease, and then to put this into a form that is easy to disseminate. You don’t have to be a naive, anti-war hippie to realize that this is a terrible idea that is sure to bring Murphy’s Law crashing down upon your head. In the same way, I am just a humble non-scientist but I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a genetic “vaccine” packaged in a lipid particle that instructs the body to make a disease, for which you cannot control the dosage or where it goes in the human body. And I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to stop testing this concoction halfway through, turn up your nose at long-term testing, bill it to the public as safe and effective, ignore contrary data, suppress alternative treatment methods, and then demonize and gaslight people who report injuries. It just seems that there are a few things that might could go wrong there. Just a thought.
A term invented by Karl Marx to encapsulate his view that money, and owning private property, is spiritually degrading for people, in his book Das Kapital.
A general term for modern post-industrial society, with special emphasis upon corrupt corporate bureaucracy, commercialism, and the “rat race” as distinctive features of “capitalism” and not just its byproducts.
An all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong in the world, such as diseases, poverty, imposter syndrome, environmental degradation, stress, and death.
Private property; the idea that people should be able to own their own houses, land, clothing, vehicles, etc., and keep the fruits of their labor.
You might notice some tension between definitions 3 and 4.
Long story short, Marx coined the term capitalism so he could make private property the world’s whipping boy, and boy howdy, did it work out for him!
right — a right is an enforceable moral claim upon another person. It follows that, for every right, there is a corresponding prohibition or obligation. For example, people have a right to life because murder is wrong. We have a right to private property because theft is wrong. Children have a right to be cared for by their parents, because parents have an obligation to care for their children. If anything is claimed to be a right, you ought to be able to flip it around and find a crime on the other side.
privilege — an additional legal or procedural right granted to one person but not others, by an authority. Privileges can be based upon seniority; for example, high-school seniors may be allowed to drive their own vehicle to school, leave campus for lunch, or pull off a “senior prank” without being punished. Or a privilege may be awarded on a case by case basis. For example, Darius asked Haman, “What should be done for the man the king delights to honor?” Haman’s answer was the man should be dressed in the king’s robe, mounted upon the king’s horse, and paraded through the city. These were privileges. Privileges can be one-time, or they can be enjoyed indefinitely, like the right of officers to eat in the captain’s cabin. Privileges can be revoked in response to bad behavior. If someone enjoys something good, but it is not a special right granted by an authority or by virtue of seniority, then the good thing is not actually a privilege but perhaps one of the things below.
advantage — a factor of any kind, from any cause, that makes it easier for someone to accomplish a goal. If the feature does not help the person accomplish the goal in view, then it is not an advantage with respect to that goal. For example, being tall is an advantage if you want to make a basket, but not if you want to take a long bus ride. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that it is very common for people who are envious of each other, for example, siblings, to each consider the other more advantaged.
benefit — a benefit is a good thing that comes to someone as a result of something else. Benefits can come to us as a result of a privilege, as a gift, from luck, or even as a result of something bad (“the benefit of experience”). Not all benefits are privileges. This is a flexible word with a wide range of meaning. Every factor in our lives has both costs and benefits. Because this is such a wide category, many benefits come to people due to factors beyond any one person’s control.
blessings, needs, the ideal — These words all describe the life we would like everyone, ideally, to have. We would like everyone to have good health; enough to eat; a clean, comfortable home; two loving parents; and a good education. We might describe these things as things people “need” in order to thrive, though many, many people live without them. Given that people seem to need them, but they turn out to be more of an ideal, we can infer that this is the sort of environment human beings were designed to function in before the world fell. We try to get as close to these as possible. To the degree that they are lacking, we suffer. When we have these things, we can consider them blessings or gifts. They are not rights in the sense of enforceable moral claims on others. To try to compel others to provide these things would, in most cases, be impossible or would constitute us doing them an injustice. (The exception is two married parents, which can be justly compelled to some degree.) Continuing with the ideals, we would like everybody to be good-looking, athletic, intelligent, talented, comfortable in their own skin, have good friends, and be easily understand by others. This is our ideal, but obviously it would be insane to try to compel other people to provide these things for us. Then we find ourselves in Harrison Bergeron territory.
It is my observation that many people use the word “right” to describe things they would like everyone to have. They say “right” when they mean “need” or “ideal.”
I’ve also noticed that many people describe every perceived advantage or benefit as a “privilege.” This is at best unclear language; at worst, it’s an attempt to foment class war. We need to cut it out.
If you are able to view video embeds on my blog, please enjoy Disney’s exploration of this concept:
Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of Unity, wrote an entire book called Prosperity in 1945 about lessons and laws of abundance. He even changes Psalm 23 to say, “The Lord is my banker. My credit is good … Though I walk in the very shadow of debt, I shall fear no evil … Thou fillest my wallet with plenty.” Can you believe it?
(Is the above really the latest Sunshine Blogger Award logo? Looks kinda messy.)
So, Bookstooge sort-of-nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Thank you, Bookstooge! I am so flattered. I think his exact words were, “If you’re reading this, consider yourself nominated, because it means you have a pulse.”
Rules For The Sunshine Blogger Award:
Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.
Answer your nominators’ questions.
Nominate up to 11 bloggers.
Ask your nominees 11 questions.
Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.
Questions from Bookstooge:
Why Would Anyone Consider Cereal to be Soup?
It’s because they are trying to categorize things according to algorithmic rules/decision trees instead of the way the human mind normally works, which is by constructing a schema for the thing in question and then eyeballing it.
With schemas, if the thing mostly resembles the schema, it is considered an instance of that thing, even if it misses checking some important boxes. And if it checks all the boxes but manifestly does NOT resemble the schema at all, then it’s not an instance of that thing.
Cereal is in the latter category. It’s an ungodly modern creation of Mr. Kellogg, who believed that eating meat was morally wrong as well as unhealthy, and sought to banish it from the breakfast table. And I say this as someone who very much likes breakfast cereal, particularly as an evening snack, even though I know it has wreaked havoc with my metabolism (see question #10).
2. Why Do You Blog?
I blog to get you interested in my books. Go buy ’em. BUT, warning, don’t buy the Kindle version of The Strange Land until the end of next week, when it will cost 99 cents because of a special promo.
3. How Do You Justify Your Existence? (I got that one from the Tales of the Black Widowers, good isn’t it?)
“So God created man. In the image of God created He him, male and female created He them. And He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the cattle and the creatures that move along the ground.'”
Edit: By quoting this passage, I am NOT asserting that the only justification for our life is to reproduce … i.e., that your life somehow has no meaning if you are not a parent. I happen to have been given three children, but that’s God’s gift to me, not mine to Him. No, the point of quoting this passage is this: I justify my existence because God made me. He made us. He wanted there to be people. He wanted us to exist as male and female. And, per the latter part of the passage, He wanted there to be a lot of us. If you exist and you are a human, He is happy about that.
4. How Do You Choose Who to Follow?
Unfortunately, I’m a lot like Trump in this way. If you say nice things to me, I like you and then I follow you.
An alternative route is that you posted something that really interested me. This usually means book reviews, discussion about writing, theology, ancient history, and sometimes art.
5. If John McClane and John Wick were tied on a railroad track and you could only set one of them free, which would you choose and why?
O.K., I had to duckduckgo him, but John McClane is the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. I would save John McClane instead of John Wick for the following reasons:
John Wick could definitely save himself.
I only saw the first Die Hard, but in it, John McClane is a family man, whereas John Wick doesn’t even have a dog anymore.
Once when we were in Indonesia, somebody swore that my husband looked exactly like Bruce Willis and now I can’t unsee it. That makes me think Bruce Willis is even more handsome.
6. In a game of Parcheesi, who would win, Spongebob Squarepants or the Doom Slayer?
I expect Spongebob to win in the same way that Bugs Bunny would.
7. Do you feel guilty about all of my oxygen that you are breathing?
Yes. My gosh, don’t remind me!
8. What is your favorite movie?
It’s a tie between The Princess Bride and a little hidden gem called Undercover Blues.
9. If you were going to be “accidentally but on purpose” killed tomorrow, how would you spend today?
I would write long letters to each of my children. If I had extra time, I’d move on to my husband, then other close family and friends.
I might try to transfer the rights to my books so they don’t go out of print, but I don’t think that could be done in one day. If you snooze, you lose, and I guess I snost and I lost.
10. Are mirrors Friend, or Foe?
Friend, but only in the sense of “faithful are the wounds of.”
11. If you could change ONE THING about your blog, what would it be?
Every single visit to my blog would result in a book purchase and then a breathless review on Amazon GO BUY MY BOOKS PEOPLE!
Ahem. I Nominate:
I nominate seven friends (the number of perfection!) plus Bookstooge cause I want to hear his answers too. And I nominate you, Reader, if you want to do it! After all, you are breathing! Which might provide the answer to my first question!
murder — Murder has to have the following components: direct killing, of a human being, intentional, and unlawful. Therefore, the following things are not murder: Executing someone who has committed a capital crime (lawful). Killing an enemy soldier in war (lawful). Accidentally killing civilians in war (unintentional). Shooting in self-defense (unintentional, and in the case of a firefight, indirect). Killing an animal, even a highly sentient animal (not human). Being unable to provide prompt medical care for someone who is OD’ing while in your custody (not direct or intentional, and also not actually killing).
genocide — direct, intentional, systematic killing of an entire ethnic group, with the express purpose of wiping them out. Not genocide: a war that has a devastating impact upon a particular ethnic group, unless all the abovementioned components of genocide are present. Invasion and conquest. Intermarriage. Taking captives. Poverty. Death of a culture because of any of these causes or because of urbanization. All of these are tragic things that have happened to many, many ethnic groups throughout history, but they are not genocide. Definitely not genocide: natural cultural change that happens because of the spread of an innovation like the written word, or a new religion.
… et regno occupato per tres potentissimos ac firmissimos populos totius Galliae sese potiri posse sperant.
Here’s the English translation given in the book:
“… and hope that, when they have seized the sovereignty, they will, by means of the three most powerful and valiant nations, be enabled to obtain possession of the whole of Gaul.”
Here’s my bumbling translation:
”… and having seized the kingdom, through three most powerful and brave peoples, they hoped to be able to be made able to all of Gaul … um … ones.”
Let’s zoom in on the phrase I am having trouble with:
sese potiri posse sperant
Now, this looks to me like “they hope [sperant] … to be able [posse] … to be MADE able [potiri] … ones [sese].”
Is it really “they hope to be able to be made able”? That’s just a ridiculous amount of helping verbs. It reminds me of the man quoted by Dave Barry, who allegedly said to his wife after she couldn’t get a ride, “If I’d a’ known you’d a’ wanted to went, I’d a seed you’d a’ got to get to go.”
But let’s look up potiri. I think it’s the passive infinitive of posse “to be able,” but maybe it’s something else.
[Duck-Duck-Go]
Ah-ha! It’s a different verb.
potior, potiris, potiri I, potitus sum (Dep.)Verb
user edited
Translations
to obtain, to acquire, to grasp, to attain, to reach (goal), to come by (experiences)
So, I’m reading A Return to Modesty, which I stumbled upon in my dad’s extensive personal library.
This book came out in 1999. I remember hearing about it at the time. I was a Christian girl in my early 20s, just a year away from getting married though I didn’t yet know it. Wendy Shalit, the author of Return, was just a year older than me. I remember being jealous of her (a girl my age who had already published a book!). I also remember that it was rather snippily received. One female reviewer mentioned that it was difficult to take “being lectured to about modesty by a 24-year-old.”
That, of course, is not a coincidence. As Shalit points out in the intro, modern sexual-liberation-niks don’t just disagree with modesty-niks; they actually hate them:
I was fascinated … with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was “obviously very troubled,” and that one seemed to have a “creepy” relationship with her father. Or “Maybe she just had a Bad Experience.” Either way, whatever her problem is, “why doesn’t the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won’t take it all so seriously?”
I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: “They’re sick, I’m telling you! I’ve heard of them with their not-touching, and they’re sick, sick, sick!” Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.
I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks.
ibid, pp. 5 – 6
By writing this book, of course, Shalit put herself among their number. She notes that feminists are often open to what she has to say about women needing privacy, dignity, and romantic dreams of a monogamous relationship … until they find out that she’s an “extreme right-winger,” that is, someone who thinks female modesty (and chastity and reticence and embarrassment and all the other things that come with it) is a good thing.
Shalit first learned of what she calls modestyniks by looking at engagement, wedding, and post-wedding pictures of an elderly couple’s granddaughter, who was following “tzniut, the Jewish laws of sexual modesty.”
In this [picture] the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy–only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. “That’s for the head covering,” her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. “A married woman cannot leave her head uncovered.”
That’s how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat.
ibid, p 4
All the reviewers who in 1999 were reacting to the thesis of Shalit’s book were so excited–or offended– by its serious content, that they failed to convey that Shalit is a terrific writer: spunky, funny, able to move from chuckles like this to very serious and heartbreaking content, and back, multiple times in the same chapter or even on the same page.
When I picked up this book from my dad’s library, in preparation for drafting my own book on the logistics of modesty (a project now shelved), I thought I might just thumb through it. I didn’t expect that it would lure me in, as books do, and prove to be a page-turner. But it has.
I won’t go over all the ways Shalit enumerates that the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, by destroying the notion of female modesty, have opened Pandora’s Box for girls and boys both. I’ve ranted about it elsewhere, and so have many others. You could probably write such a rant yourself, and maybe you even have. I will say that it’s really poignant to read a book like this written in 1999.
The 90s are now officially A Long Time Ago. Cars from the 90s are now antiques (!). I am even starting to see memes that portray the 90s in a similar way that we once portrayed the 50s: a naive, wholesome time, when we didn’t have all the problems we have now. For example, one meme said something like, “The 90s were so problem-free that Kurt Cobain had to kill himself because he had nothing to be depressed about.”
As someone who came of age in the 90s, I cry foul. We were a good 30+ years after the Sexual Revolution and 20+ after Roe. We were deep into the divorce and moms-having-serial-boyfriends epidemic. We had anorexia and bulimia and cutting. Ninties kids did not have one foot in pre-1960s social norms; instead, we were completely unmoored from any kind of consistent or coherent framework for how to relate to the opposite sex, or even how to become a man or woman, except that we knew that both of those things were bad. Shalit’s book focuses on the destructive messages that girls and young women got:
Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him that you’re an independent person.
ibid, p. 94
… but of course, boys got a very similar litany about how they were not supposed to be polite or gentlemanly or, God forbid, protective of women, and in fact they were not supposed to take any initiative at anything.
They also were sadly unprepared for the fact that women have lots of emotions:
“My ex-girlfriends? Well, let’s see … she was a nut, and then she was a nut, and then her … let’s see … yes, she was a nut, and then … yeah, she was a nut, too, come to think of it! It’s strange that I’ve had such bad luck, to date so many nuts. Anyway, then there was what’s-her-name, who was evil. She left me. God, that really sucked! She was really evil! And then there was another nut …”
What makes a man perceive a woman as a “a nut”? And can all women be nuts? A silly question. Clearly all women can’t be nuts. What does it mean, then, when a society judges that a considerable number of its women are, in fact, nuts? Could it tell us something about how we view womanhood?
ibid, p. 163
If I had read this book in the 90s, I probably would have agreed with it, in a slightly superior, glad-you-finally-came-to-the-modesty-party kind of way, like the smug 20-something Christian know-it-all that I was at the time. I also would have missed a lot of the content that is now resonating with me. Because I’ve spent the 26 years since this book was published wrestling with these very issues and going on these very rants.
I might have been raised in a Christian home. I might have come up in a social environment that was relatively traditional compared to the secular one in which Shalit grew up. I even, somehow, escaped the super-explicit sex-ed elementary school classes in the public schools that Shalit was spared only because her mom found out what was happening, threw a fit, and got Shalit a pass to sit out that class in the library. (I’m not sure how I escaped the explicit sex-ed, to be honest. I went to public schools. Possibly it’s because our family moved a couple of times and school districts were on different schedules.)
But even with being–you would expect–sheltered, I still absorbed all the same messages she did, directly from the teat of society, as it were. As a Christian, I did get the message that you were supposed to be chaste until marriage (opposite of the message she got). But on the other hand I received, loud and clear, the picture of the ideal woman as tough, smart, independent, unconcerned about her clothing or appearance, ready to go join the Navy S.E.A.L.s … basically, a woman with a man’s mind and as close as possible to a man’s body. Girls who had their wedding all planned out at the age of 9 and had already picked out names for their kids, and who wore pink and giggled and blushed and so forth, were “stupid.” I’m a 90s kid, after all.
Anyway … the sad thing about reading this book is, almost thirty years later, nothing has changed. Shalit predicted a return to modesty among my generation. We were figuring out, she said, that modesty is natural to us, it protects us, it’s ultimately more romantic and even sensual. That was why, she said, we liked Jane Austen so much. And while I plead guilty on all charges, it turns out that longing for a return to female modesty has not been enough. You cannot just bring back an entire social system that is lying in smithereens at your feet. There weren’t any rules or norms or consensus about how a girl–or boy–should dress or talk or behave, and we didn’t know what to do. None of us knew what to do. And when I look at my kids’ generation, they still don’t.
Out of Babel Books 