I seldom visit Crooked Timber, and was therefore surprised to see two December threads on Shakespeare (and related topics) that were consistently interesting: Would Bacon’s Hamlet be Hamlet? and A molehill as high as Tenerife. Two commenters on the second post couldn’t resist dragging in Reagan and Nixon and saying stupid things about them, but otherwise the threads are intelligent, informative, and polite — not to mention very long. I would visit the site more often if it had more informal literary criticism and less philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. I suppose I should stop by once a month to see what turns up.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to post here every day, and to cut down on my comments on other blogs. (It’s so much easier to find one’s own posts when a subject recurs.) To get started, I’ll recycle and merge a couple of comments I recently left at Betsy’s Page.

One of the stupidest of the tag-team trolls that infest her blog recently defended clitoridectomy in the Muslim world by equating it to male circumcision. This assertion is of course (a) obviously false and (b) a favorite of anti-Semites. Male circumcision is often said to detract somewhat from sexual pleasure — not that many men would know, since the vast majority of circumcisions are done on infants, and adult circumcision would no doubt have psychological as well as physical effects. However, it also protects against AIDS, and is currently recommended for non-religious reasons in countries where AIDS is rampant, e.g. parts of Africa. Clitoridectomy reduces sexual pleasure to zero, and is designed to do exactly that: it has no other purpose. Accompanying operations often make sex downright painful for the woman, though more pleasurable for the man. When other commenters replied that clitoridectomy is much more like castration than circumcision, the troll tried to evade the issue by writing: “Clitorectomy and circumcision have some aspects in common, as well as some differences.”

Of course, heart transplant surgery has “some” (quite obvious) “aspects in common” with the ancient Aztec practice of cutting out the living hearts of captives and eating them, but anyone who equated the two morally would be a liar or a fool.

Some quotations from The Guilty River (1886):

1. The hero’s stepmother describes their Member of Parliament, who has been unlucky in love (VI):

“. . . quite broken-hearted about Lady Lena; gone away to America to shoot bears.”

2. The hero on himself (VII):

The habits that I had contracted, among my student friends in Germany, made tobacco and beer necessary accompaniments to the process of thinking. I had nearly exhausted my cigar, my jug, and my thoughts, when I saw two men approaching me from the end of the terrace.

3. The (very handsome, and deaf) villain addresses the heroine (XIII):

“Are you one of the few women who dislike an ugly man? Women in general, I can tell you, prefer ugly men. A handsome man matches them on their own ground, and they don’t like that. ‘We are so fond of our ugly husbands; they set us off to such advantage.’ Oh, I don’t report what they say; I speak the language in which they think.”

4. The hero again (XVII):

When the detective police force encounters intelligence instead of stupidity, in seven cases out of ten the detective police force is beaten.

Here are two more quotations from A Rogue’s Life (1856), which I read a few weeks ago:

5. The rogue-narrator lists the principal categories of “professedly hard-hearted persons” who will be uninterested in the story of his love for the heroine (VII):

. . . monks, misogynists, political economists . . .

6. One of the more surprising bits of A Rogue’s Life was the parenthetical description of “a frugal curate’s dinner” (XII):

. . . bit of fish, two chops, mashed potatoes, semolina pudding, half-pint of sherry . . .

That seems like quite a lot for one frugal meal. Perhaps the chops were very small.

Since Jules Crittenden’s site truncated my comment twice, though it was shorter than many posted previously, I’ll post it here. A commenter calling himself ‘alphie’ — no doubt the same idiot who infests Protein Wisdom — was going on about how Stalin won World War II more or less single-handedly by killing 90% of the German soldiers who were killed. Others pointed out that a lot of those German deaths were from gross mistreatment of German soldiers in Soviet prison camps. Here is what I added:

alphie uses an argument that many have used before him, just as dishonestly. He pretends that the German army was the only enemy to be defeated in World War II. No doubt it was the strongest enemy, but the Japanese Army, Air Force, and especially Navy were quite formidable, and the USSR did <1% of the killing and dying needed to defeat them. The German Navy — the U-boats, I mean — was also quite formidable, and the USSR did <1% of the killing and dying needed to defeat it. I don’t know how to apportion the defeat of the German Air Force between the western allies and the USSR, but I suspect that the US and UK did most of that, too — certainly far more than 10%. Of course, the Italian armed forces were nothing like as effective, but they still had to be defeated, and it was the US and UK that did much of the work of defeating the Italian Army and Air Force and all of the work of defeating the Italian Navy. On the other hand, the USSR did most of the work of defeating the minor Axis allies, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. To sum up, anyone who pretends that the USSR did 90% of the work of defeating the Axis as a whole — army, navy, and air force of three major powers and four smaller countries — is a liar or a fool. Which is alphie? Hard to say, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

Postscript: I just realized the problem. The less-than signs were being taken as HTML, so everything after them was truncated. Substituting LT between an ampersand and a semicolon should take care of that. I guess I’ll go over to Crittenden’s blog and post this there as well.

Sometimes a troll will say something so stupid that it inspires thoughts that would not otherwise have been thought.

A law professor in Colorado has called Instapundit a “fascist” and suggested that he be fired for wondering “why the Bush administration wasn’t acting covertly to kill radical mullahs and atomic scientists, rather than preparing a major attack on Iran. (Silly me, I thought this was advocating a less warlike approach).” Part of Instapundit’s argument is that the ban on assassinations is not a law passed by Congress but an executive order, which means any president can rescind or amend it.

One of the trollier trolls on Protein Wisdom objects: “It’s not illegal if the President overturns the order. Isn’t that illegal now then?” Well, yeah, it is illegal now. I imagine Instapundit assumed that his readers were smart enough to realize that he thinks that the president should first cancel or revise the executive order, and only then start assassinating insane mullahs and the nuclear scientists who work for them.

So much was obvious, but it gave me an idea: Bush should ostentatiously rescind the presidential order while pointedly declining to say whether he intends to make use of the new (lack of) rules. That would concentrate a few minds, and not only in Iran. Kim Jong Il might start seriously thinking about doing a Kadhafi on his nuclear inventory, rather than risk dying much earlier than actuarial tables calculate. Bashar Assad might spend more time trying to make his Syrian subjects less miserable and less time making the Lebanese as miserable as possible. Cuban generals furtively planning for life after the Castros might start thinking a little more about topping up their Swiss bank accounts and contacting realtors on the Riviera and a little less about which colleagues they would have to kill to keep power over a country that no sane person would want to be responsible for in the first place. Examples could easily be multiplied. After a few months, when none of the plausible targets has died suddenly or of mysterious causes, they would start relaxing their guard. That would be the time for Bush to use his reclaimed powers, preferably all on the same day in several countries on more than one continent.

There has been quite a kerfuffle in the Blogosphere about Centanni and Wiig’s conversion to Islam, with David Warren, Mark Steyn, and Kathy Shaidle leading the prosecution, and Capt. Ed doing his best for the defense. Of course, asking newsmen to die for whatever faith they may have is asking a lot. In their position, I might well have been weak enough to go through with the conversion ceremony, too, especially after a week or so of imprisonment, threats (implicit or explicit), and abuse (psychological, if not physical) designed to break my will. However, even if I did, I hope I would have had the decency, and the nerve, to do it with my fingers unobtrusively but visibly crossed (as a symbol of insincerity and Christianity), or a wink at the most significant moment, or a sudden fit of the giggles at the most solemn point.

And I certainly hope I would have had the guts to do what they should have done as soon as they got home. What would that be?

1. Head straight from the airport to my local Red, Hot, and Blue, with Fox camera crew in tow.
2. Order pitchers of beer for the house and brutally mock any crew-member or customer who declined to join in, and to be filmed joining in, without very good reason. (Good reasons: underage status, pregnancy, religious beliefs of long standing. Bad reasons: fear of terrorists or of giving offense, religious beliefs adopted in the previous 24 hours.)
3. Order whatever combination of dishes would provide the most different kinds of pork in one meal, and eat some of each on-camera with relish (the metaphorical kind, of course). Again, mock any who declined to join in.
4. Announce on-camera, with a half-gnawed rib-bone in one hand and a half-drunk beer in the other, that I am not now, never have been, and never will be a Muslim, and that anyone who says I am is obviously a liar or a fool, since forced conversions are utterly invalid in any society other than the most barbaric.
5. Arrange for Fox to spend the next week asking every ‘moderate Muslim leader’ they can entice in front of a camera whether they think my forced conversion was valid or not. If they say yes, arrange for a ‘Liar or Fool’ internet or telephone poll, with results displayed on screen. If they waffle, insist on a clear yes or no.
6. If they complain about the provocation, tell the ‘moderate Muslim leaders’ off-camera that I won’t publicly call their religion stupid or trashy or Mediaeval, or make the sign of the cross at them, or pour holy water on their mosques at midnight, or picket their services, or shake hands and then tell him the gloves you’re wearing are pigskin, or buy a Koran and drop-kick it into a dumpster, or do any of a dozen other things that are still perfectly legal in a free country, as long as they and their followers leave me alone. In short, try to convince them that ‘Live and let live’ is the only way to go.

Sure, I’d have to live like Salman Rushdie, surrounded by bodyguards, but it would be worth it to see the look on some people’s faces.

I see from Protein Wisdom that Tbogg (no link for him) has been bragging about his “passion” for books. That kind of thing makes me think of this bit from A Fish Called Wanda:

Otto: Don’t call me stupid.
Wanda: Oh, right, to call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs. I’ve known sheep that could outwit you, but you think you’re an intellectual don’t you, ape?
Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes, they do Otto, they just don’t understand it.

No hay tanto opiniones estúpidas como estúpidos que opinan.

It is not so much that there are stupid opinions as that there are stupid people who have opinions.

(Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito, 1.133)

There are disadvantages in posting comments on other people’s sites instead of one’s own. Not only does it reduce the available quantity of home-grown fodder for the browsing herds, you never know when some rude person is going to slip in a comment just before yours that is 4,375 words long (actual count), many of them capitalized or bold-face or both. Whether right- or wrong-headed — I’ll never know, since I didn’t read it — such a comment will naturally cause a huge drop in the number of readers who go on to read yours.

The only solution is to repost the precious verbiage on one’s own site. The following paragraphs are quoted from my comment on this post at Protein Wisdom. They should be clear enough without the preceding context:

Since [troll-name omitted] keeps insisting on his benchmark, I’d like to note a serious problem with it. Here’s the supposedly damning WP quotation:

The number of Iraqi army battalions judged by their American trainers to be capable of fighting insurgents without U.S. help has fallen from one to none since September, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

And here’s the following sentence he carefully omitted (thanks, Jim in Chicago):

But the number of Iraqi battalions capable of leading the battle, with U.S. troops in a support role, has grown by nearly 50 percent. And the number of battalions engaged in combat has increased by 11 percent.

Am I the only one who realizes that these two developments are probably connected? If I were trying to build an effective army of 100+ battalions from scratch in the middle of a war or insurrection, here’s what I would do:

1. Put together one or two or three battalions of the best men I could find, put them into battle situations as soon as they look like they’re ready, and see how they do. No doubt some would do better than others.

2. In building dozens more new battalions from raw recruits, add a few seasoned veterans to each one to provide them with backbone, experience, and the high morale that comes from having proven winners in the unit. Where are these seasoned veterans to come from? The battle-hardened first-string battalions, of course. That will detract from their fighting ability in the short run as good men are taken away, but they can be ‘topped up’ with raw recruits and kept fighting until the latter get the hang of it.

I have no inside knowledge, or military experience, but it’s obvious to anyone who thinks about it that a single first-rate battle-hardened battalion may be more valuable as ‘seed corn’ and hands-on training academy than as a single unit. Lowering its effectiveness by sending many of its men to newer, rawer units may in fact be the best and fastest way to increase the effectiveness of the army as a whole. The only downside is that it confuses stupid journalists and blog commenters, and allows the less honest ones to make disingenuous arguments.

I suspect there are historical examples to the process I’ve outlined. It’s well-known that the British recruited a (Jewish, not Muslim) ‘Palestinian Brigade’ that fought (very well) in North Africa and Italy in World War II. Many of its members were later heroes of the Israeli fight for independence. Did the nascent nation of Israel keep all their combat veterans in a single unit in their fledgling army, or did they split them up and mix them in with masses of new recruits? I’m pretty sure they did the latter, since it’s the obvious thing to do.

To sum up, a dozen competent battalions are more useful than one superb one, and can also be turned into a dozen superb battalions a lot more quickly than one can, especially if there’s a large-scale war or insurrection going on in which they can all easily get combat experience.

You might think that a Latin teacher would have gotten around to seeing Spartacus in his first ten or twelve years of full-time teaching, if he hadn’t seen it before. Not me: I’m not fond of blockbusters and costume dramas, and just got around to watching it earlier today. (My students have all seen it in previous Latin classes, which removes one incentive.) What pushed me to fill this embarrassing gap? I saw most of Quo Vadis Christmas Day, and was pleasantly surprised — either it’s a lot better than I had thought or my standards are slipping. My desultory and no doubt unoriginal thoughts on first viewing Spartacus:

1. The gladiator-training equipment was very impressive, but I couldn’t tell whether it is authentically ancient or cleverly imagined or some combination of the two. (Maybe I should do some research? No, too much trouble.)
2. Lots of good lines. When a distinguished guest arrives unexpectedly, the host orders “Second-best wine . . . no, best, but small goblets.”
3. Were Lentulus the lanista (trainer of gladiators) in Spartacus and Nero in Quo Vadis played by the same man? (Pause to check IMDB.) Yes: Peter Ustinov. A famous name, so why don’t I know his face (and his googly eyes)? I really need to watch more movies.
4. I try to avoid the usual classicist’s vice of counting up the historical inaccuracies, but I couldn’t help noticing one thing. What made the men look most modern and least Roman was their hairstyles. Also, in general, Rome and Italy and the actors were all far too clean.
5. The cognomen of Marcus Publius Glabrus, the weenie who lost six cohorts by being too stupid to fortify his camp, includes a cruel joke. Glabrus is not a Latin word, but is obviously related to glaber, which is an adjective meaning “hairless” and a noun referring to a male slave whose body hair has been removed, no doubt at his master’s orders.
6. Which reminds me: The wickedest Roman, Crassus, is (a) given some conventionally proto-fascist and palaeo-McCarthyite things to say, and (b) a predatory bisexual. The less wicked and less ‘right-wing’ Gracchus is promiscuous, but strictly heterosexual, and Spartacus himself is monogamously heterosexual. Hmmmm . . . .
7. When Crassus forces Spartacus and Antoninus to fight to the death, with the winning prize crucifixion, why do they do go along? They could have run on each other’s swords simultaneously — some Romans committed suicide that way — or attacked the ring of soldiers surrounding them and taken a few with them as they died. After killing Antoninus, Spartacus has another chance to kill Crassus, who comes up close to taunt him before he has been disarmed. In short, why don’t they do as the Nubian gladiator had done earlier on, when he refused to kill Spartacus in the ring and instead tried twice to kill Crassus, first throwing his trident at him and then climbing the wall for a more personal attack?

Now I suppose I’d better find time to watch Gladiator. But not yet: I have Le Corbeau and The Revenger’s Tragedy out from U.N.C. library, and the combination of a 3-day loan period and a 55-mile round-trip to return them means that they come first.

(Point 7 added at 11:00 am the next day.)

I recently put this in the comments at The Indepundit, but it seems worth saying here as well. That way, I can find it again easily.

I am really getting tired of people saying that the famous ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner meant that Bush was claiming the war was over. Anyone who knows anything at all about the military knows that a mission is not a war. A war is divided into campaigns, in each of which particular units are assigned particular missions. In other words, a mission is a part of a part of a war. In this case, the Abraham Lincoln’s mission (providing air support for the defeat of Saddam’s army) was in fact accomplished, which is why the carrier was heading back to the U.S. when Bush visited. Anyone who claims that ‘Mission Accomplished’ means ‘War is Over’ is either ignorant or dishonest. Of course, we’ve been told that thousands of times in the last couple of years. That just shows how many ignorant and dishonest people there are in the anti-Bush league.

Lileks finds some coded Latin, but concludes that it must be gibberish, since the online Latin translator couldn’t handle it. That just shows how stupid machines are. It is not quite classical Latin, but close enough to have a meaning. Lileks’ text is missing the first letter — easy enough when it’s written in Morse code and the letter is an I. It should read:

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI.

Classical Latin would spell the second word GYRUM and the last one IGNE, but this is good Mediaeval (aka Vulgar) Latin. It means “At night we go into a gyre [= whirl/circle/ring] and are consumed by fire”. That’s not a very clear or satisfying meaning, but better than average for palindromes. With one more syllable at the beginning, it would be an epic (dactylic hexameter) line: again, that’s probably the best meter we can expect from a palindrome. The version with ECCE (”look!”) inserted after NOCTE fulfills (barely) the minimum requirements for a hexameter, but the meaning is even clunkier.

This site has some interesting, but not entirely accurate, information on the words (click on Palindromes – it’s the first one on the right). I don’t see anything macaronic about the line, and suspect that a moth would be at least as likely as a mayfly to fly in circles and be consumed by fire. I wonder if this gyre has anything to do with the one Yeats asked someone or other to perne in in “Sailing to Byzantium”.

It’s been over three years since I checked, but I’m still Google’s number one hit for “the stupid questions department”.

In today’s ScreedBlog, James Lileks writes of those impute ‘religious fascism’ to American Christians:

It’s curious that this word should re-enter domestic politics at the same time we are not only fighting actual religious fascists, but are embroiled in a controversy over the mistreatment of the tome they regard as their instruction manual.

It may be curious, but it is far from surprising. Surely this is a textbook case of psychological displacement. As Psych Central puts it (with a name like that, they ought to know), displacement refers to “an unconscious defence mechanism, whereby the mind redirects emotion from a ‘dangerous’ object to a ‘safe’ object. For instance, some people punch cushions when angry at friends.” Indeed they do, and I know someone who used to smash burned-out lightbulbs on the bathroom floor and then carefully clean up the bits: she found it helped her equanimity if she took out her hostilities on a worthless inanimate object now and then. Some children feel more comfortable worrying about a monster lurking under the bed or an evil monkey who lives in the closet than an alcoholic mother or brutal step-father. And many Americans (and even more Europeans) feel more comfortable pretending that they are in grave danger from ‘religious fascists’ who will at worst reduce their access (oh no!) to pornography and liquor, or try to make their children (eek!) pledge allegiance to the flag in school, or even (the horror! the horror!) refuse to lower their tax rates when they marry someone of the same gender, all while actual religious fascists are trying to kill or enslave them and all their descendants.

Some displacements are more harmful than others. Punching a pillow instead of a friend is generally a very good idea. Redirecting childhood fears about grownups over whom you have no control onto imaginary horrors may conceivably be the best available option until you are old enough to move out of the house. But making enemies of Christians who will at worst inconvenience or annoy you, and who are your allies against the Muslims who are trying to kill you, is shortsighted, stupid, and deeply immoral.

It’s not quite the same thing, but I am reminded of something A. E. Housman wrote, explaining why so many readers prefer to believe that the manuscripts of ancient authors are better than they are:

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason, — ‘the bulk of mankind’ says Swift, ‘is as well qualified for flying as for thinking,’ — but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine follow, and that he will rise again from the dead.

(This is from Part IV of the preface to his edition of the first book of Manilius’ Astronomica, London, 1903, on line here.) Similarly, those who believe that Christians are more of a threat to their way of life than (some) Muslims believe that not because they have investigated the problem, but because they would feel uncomfortable if they did not believe it.

Ann Althouse has an interesting post about raising the retirement age for Social Security. The last paragraph is an update:

In the Comments: Responses that show why politicians don’t dare to suggest the obvious, obvious solution! Make this proposal and the practically next words you hear will be “dog food.”

I have known for many years that ‘old folks forced by poverty to eat dog food’ is almost certainly an urban legend. Way back in the late Carter or early Reagan years, one of the regular columnists in The American Spectator (perhaps Tom Bethell or Ben Stein) went to the trouble of testing the basic plausibility of this already-widespread belief. He checked the price of a 2-pound can of Alpo at his local supermarket, and reported that for the same amount of money he could buy a pound of chicken and a pound of potatoes, with two cents left over. In other words, dog food ain’t cheap, and old folks who eat it, if they exist at all, need to be examined for (other) symptoms of senility, insanity, or plain old-fashioned stupidity.

I was about to hit ‘publish’ on the paragraph above when I realized that I ought to get off my butt and see whether this is still true. Perhaps dog food is a better deal than it was twenty-something years ago. I spent a few minutes this morning checking prices at my local Giant, which happens to be next door to the largest old folks’ home in Baltimore County: at 52, I was the 2nd-youngest customer in the store. In what follows, all prices are per pound, not per container or serving. I didn’t worry about the size of the packages at all, but recorded the price per pound displayed on the shelf, and assumed that the impoverished elderly could and would buy whatever portion size (up to 6 or 7 pounds) would save money. Here is what I found in the dog food aisle:

Canned Alpo or Pedigree: 83.2¢.
Giant’s house brand ‘Companion’ (cute name!): 57.5¢ to $1.43, depending on size.
Purina Moist & Meaty burgers: $1.09.
Cesar Select dinners: $3.15.
Beggin’ Strips: $6.38 to $9.04. (Why not just to buy the dog some bacon?)

What about the more standard alternatives? I’ll start with the chicken and then list some of the fruits and vegetables I found that were even cheaper, in order from most to least expensive:

Chicken: 99¢ (Purdue chicken leg quarters on sale) or $1.29 (18 piece fryer pack).
Yellow onions: 83.3¢ ($2.49 for a 3-lb bag).
Turnips: 79¢.
Green (aka ‘spring’) onions: 79¢.
Eggs: around 70¢ ($1.19 per dozen for XL, package marked “1 lb 11 oz”).
Carrots: 69.8¢ ($3.49 for a 5-lb bag).
Green beans: 63.2¢ (Del Monte, in the 6 lb 5 oz can).
Cabbage: 59¢.
Bananas: 49¢.
White potatoes: 44.6¢ ($1.88 for a 5 lb bag).

At some times of the year, apples and tomatoes would probably also drop below 99¢ per pound. Of course, Alpo is 100% edible, whereas all of the alternatives except the canned green beans have bones, shells, skins, or stems to discard, but they’re all at least mostly (80+%) edible, unlike (e.g.) artichokes or pistachio nuts, and I suspect Alpo contains more than its share of unnutricious gristle. Whether baked or boiled, potatoes with skins on are better for you anyway. So far, it looks like dog food could be slightly cheaper, if you stick to the house brand, since a diet of cabbages, bananas, and potatoes would be hard to keep up for long.

I didn’t think to check the prices of bread, rice, or hot dogs, all of which would have included some very inexpensive options, and Giant seems to be all out of 50-packs of tortillas, which I have often bought there for around $3.00, if I’m not mistaken. Nor did I look for day-old baked goods or marked-down damaged canned goods. However, I did take a look at some of the dried foods. These are much harder to evaluate accurately, since a pound of noodles or dried beans will likely turn into roughly two pounds of food when boiled into edibility, and is therefore equivalent to something like two pounds of canned dog food, where the water is already included in the purchase weight. (No, I will not get a scale and weigh a package of noodles or beans before and after boiling. It’s not like I’m getting paid to write this stuff.) Here is what I found:

Ramen noodles: 88¢ (suprisingly high, but unusually dry — perhaps they triple or quadruple in weight when boiled?).
Macaroni: 75¢ to 99¢ (a dozen varieties, some on sale).
Dried beans (half a dozen kinds: black, white, yellow, lima — like a Benetton ad!): 69¢-79¢.
Dried lentils: 55¢.

Cut those prices in half to adjust for the wet-dry comparison, and they’re even cheaper than house brand dog food. If anyone objects that some dog foods are also sold dry, I will point out that they also generally sell for $1.00 per pound or more.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t care to live on a diet including only the (human) foods mentioned, but I could certainly get used to it very quickly if the only alternative were dog food. Many healthy and (relatively) tasty human foods are in fact cheaper than dog food, and eating dog food will not save you money unless you’re too stupid to choose the cheapest non-canine foods.

Update: (half an hour later)

I don’t doubt that people have eaten dog food now and then for non-budgetary reasons, and posted on the topic a few weeks ago in Eating One’s Own Dog Food, I.

1. If Earthlink really had suspended my account for unspecified reasons, and sent me an e-mail to say so that does not contain my name but does refer me to a non-Earthlink URL to fix the problem, wouldn’t I at least not be getting all that other spam?

2. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure I don’t have any wealthy relatives unknown to me, even more certain that if I did they wouldn’t be the sort to die in a plane crash in Togo, and absolutely certain that such a putative relative would not be named ‘Ferras Weevil’. Any (human) Weevils in Togo or elsewhere are no relation to me, since Weevil is not my real name. Not to mention that my correspondent in Togo alleges that he is the legal agent of the late Mr. Weevil, whose $14,000,000 fortune was apparently not embezzled, as it usually is in these offers, in which case surely I would have a right to more than the pathetic 40% that he offers to send me as legal heir. What kind of probate lawyer demands 60% just for tracking down the next of kin? I wonder whether this moron is actually editing each individual e-mail to mail it separately, or has a mail-merge program to tailor his scam-spams to their addressees.

Gerard Van Der Leun (American Digest) fisks a senile rant by Norman Mailer in The Huffington Post (or P.R. Huff’n’stuff, as I like to think of it). Though his criticisms are eloquent and convincing, one of them is ill-aimed:

“Lenin did leave us one valuable notion, one, at any rate.”

Only one? Surely, Norman, you can think of others. After all, Lenin actually achieved the power that eluded you in your many clown shows that sought elected office.

It was ‘Whom?’ When you cannot understand a curious matter, ask yourself, ‘Whom? Whom does this benefit?’ ”

That’s it? That’s the “one valuable notion” left by Lenin before he became an exhibit in the Soviet Wax Museum? I’m no Lenin scholar, but my aging mind is not so far gone that it can’t think of a few others beginning with “Just shoot any political opposition and keep shooting them.”

And “Whom?” Perhaps it might be the formal grammar from your schooldays kicking in, Norman, but I think that it is an odds-on certainty that Lenin probably said “Who.” After all, it is not “Whom’s Whom,” but “Who’s Who.”

In fact, “who” vs. “whom” is a false dichotomy: Lenin actually said both, in the form “Who whom?”. The meaning of this enigmatic phrase seems to be that in any political situation, the most important question is who is the subject, the “who”, the one doing things, and who is the object, the “whom”, the one having things done to him. With no verb expressed, it’s not quite as general as “Who does what to whom?”. The approximate meaning of Lenin’s omitted verb — the “what” in my longer version — is not much in doubt, and I imagine that “Who whom?” is short for “Who controls whom?”, though some might prefer a stronger verb like ‘oppress’ or ‘shoot’.

One of Anthony Powell’s early (pre-Dance to the Music of Time) novels is titled Agents and Patients. It’s been many years since I read it, but as I recall the point of the title is very similar to Lenin’s apophthegm: that the world is divided into those who do things (agents) and those who have things done to them (patients) and it’s better to be an agent than a patient. I believe Powell’s Latinate nomenclature is borrowed from Mediaeval scholastic philosophy, but would have to consult more knowledgeable friends to be sure .

Obligatory pedantic postscript: As for my title, haplography is when (e.g.) a Mediaeval scribe copying a manuscript writes a word or phrase once that he should have written twice. The repetition in the source text need not be exact, so writing “Whom?” for “Who whom?” counts. The opposite of haplography, repeating a word or phrase that occurs only once in the source text, is dittography. Haplography is much commoner in manuscripts than dittography, since a weary scribe has more incentive to lighten his load by omitting words or phrases than to increase it by repeating them.

I wonder how the mistake occurred. Did Mailer’s word processor tell him or his secretary to change “Who whom?” to “Whom?”? Grammar checkers are stupid, and this phrase looks as if it ought to trigger an objection, but I just tried it in Word and it passed without a beep. Did an ignorant amanuensis ‘correct’ the phrase? Or is Mailer’s aged and not-entirely-well-cared-for brain dropping necessary syllables without prompting?

One final question: How many pedantry points do I get for using ‘amanuensis’, ‘apophthegm’, ‘dittography’, and ‘haplography’ all in the same post?

Michelle Malkin quotes some hateful comments from Democratic Underground (no link for them) gloating over Laura Ingraham’s recent breast cancer diagnosis, refusing to join Elizabeth Edwards in praying for her, and in some cases wishing she would die. Some of the troglodytes lurking in the Democratic Underground sound a lot like the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which begins “I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” As I recall, the translation I read in college begins “I am an unpleasant man.”

One of Malkin’s quotations is “I hope she goes into remission and [expletive deleted] chokes to death”. I’m not very clear just who Laura Ingraham is (someone on television?), but I hope she goes into remission, too. Of course, this evil-minded moron is presumably praying for relapse rather than remission, but too stupid to know the difference.

If you’re going to call the new Pope “the Grand Inquisitor” because he once headed the organization long ago known as the Inquisition, shouldn’t you be consistent? Somewhere in Massachusetts (Salem, I guess) there must a judge you can call “Witchburner” because he sits on the same bench long ago occupied by a judge who sentenced witches to be burned at stake. (Probably in other towns, too, though Salem’s witches are the best-known.) And I suppose you could call the current chief judge in Fort Smith, Arkansas “the Hangin’ Judge” as if he were somehow responsible for the deeds of his predecessor, Isaac Parker. But wouldn’t that be an obviously stupid thing to do? Not to mention potentially libelous. (Note to judges in Salem and Fort Smith: I said you could say such a thing, not that I do say it, or ever would.)

Update: (4/27, 1:00 am)

I had a nagging feeling there was something I needed to check before posting: for “Witchburner” read “Witchhanger” (or “Witchstretcher”?), and see the first comment for why.