On Empathizing with Enemies

Thomas Sowell had a Random Thought (not that very many of his thoughts actually are):

Hillary Clinton’s idea that we have to see the world from our adversaries’ point of view—and even “empathize” with it—is not new. Back in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said, “I have realized vividly how Herr Hitler feels.” Ronald Reagan, however, made sure our adversaries understood how we felt. Reagan’s approach turned out a lot better than Chamberlain’s.

But Liberals think we’re insufferably arrogant to defend our own points of view. We always should subordinate ourselves to the other guy.

And this one on a different, yet sadly related, matter:

It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, “All lives matter,” after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, “Black lives matter.” If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators.

Sometimes I think our Liberals are our modern-day Xanthippe, and their usefulness is limited to strengthening our own character.

Happy New Year

Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun. Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than I.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson

Update: <sigh> Corrected the date….

Merry Christmas

First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Update:

Why do bells ring at Christmas?

Because someone pulls the rope.

The PRC’s Territorial Aggrandizement

This is an example of the People’s Republic of China’s practice of Rule by Law, rather than Rule of Law.

Among other moves and countermoves involving the PRC’s attempts to seize and annex the South China Sea, here at the expense of the Republic of the Philippines, the latter haled the former into arbitration under the UN’s Law of the Sea Convention. The proximate case was the PRC’s military aggression against the RP over Scarborough Shoal, a collection of islands and rich fishing waters well within the RP’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

After first denying the legitimacy of arbitration at all, now the PRC is arguing that the arbitration panel has no jurisdiction in the matter because the dispute involves the PRC’s “territorial sovereignty over several maritime features in the South China Sea, which is beyond the scope of the Convention.”

Sure. The PRC has claimed the Sea, therefore the Sea is the PRC’s. By law. Because the Law of the Sea Convention doesn’t interfere with sovereign territory.

Do We Want To Do Business with Racist Europe?

That’s a bit polemic, but this is an important matter.

Leicester City Council in England last month voted to boycott goods made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. All services run by the council will be free of any product or technology made in any of the settlements. The motion “condemns the Government of Israel for its continuing illegal occupation of Palestine’s East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and resolves “to boycott any produce originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

And more “Zionistfrei:”

Pro-Palestinian campaigners lobbied the town’s [Kinvara, Ireland] retailers, restaurants and cafes to expunge from their premises anything produced in Israel. All the businesses agreed, meaning Kinvara is now, in the eyes of anti-Israel agitators, morally pure. It is held up as a model town by numerous European backers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement.

And

[T]he French city of Lille in October ripped up its twinning accord with the Israeli city of Safed.

And on and on.

Never mind that the Palestinian Unity Government is sworn to the destruction of Israel, and Iran has as its paramount national goal the erasure of Israel from the map. Their “product or technology” are jake in Leicester City, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe.

Shades of Europe’s Judenfrei of the last century.