A history podcaster apparently went on Tucker Carlson’s show with a number of revisionist takes on WWII.  While I’m told the podcast itself was at least somewhat nuanced, the guy responded to attacks on Twitter with flamebait responses like Churchill Was WWII’s Greatest Villain.

A bunch of boring argument ensued.

FWIW I pretty much share the conventional view on WWII (Nazis boo, Soviets boo but not as boo in the short term, America yay, England yay, victory mismanaged) though I also don’t get worked up about people with chops arguing points or entertaining counterfactuals.  But here I am going to try to say something that hasn’t been repeated elsewhere already  (and I invite you to do the same).  It’s something that should have some application to Mormon history. (more…)

Thermopylae probably happened around this time of year.

Honor to those who in the life they lead

define and guard a Thermopylae.

Never betraying what is right,

consistent and just in all they do

but showing pity also, and compassion;

generous when they are rich, and

when they are poor,

still generous in small ways,

still helping as much as they can;

always speaking the truth,

without hating those who lie.

And even more honor is due to them

when they foresee (as many do foresee)

that in the end Ephialtis will make his appearance,

that the Medes will break through after all.

— Cavafy

This was a really cool summary of current trends in biology.  The conclusion, about agency, will be of particular interest to the Saints.

Yesterday had some synchronicity.  We are currently reading The Boys in the Boat as a family.  I posted a quote from it yesterday.  It’s a book about the collegiate rowing team that won the Olympics in 1936 but also a book about Joe Rantz, one of the rowers, struggling to achieve the perfect trust necessary for perfect rowing after a hardscrabble adolescence where he was abandoned by his dad at his stepmother’s behest during the Great Depression.  She is the classic wicked stepmother, though the author works hard to give you perspective enough to see why she fell into the trap she did.  You end up seeing her as more pathetic and meager than villainous.

Not Joe Rantz’s stepmother

Then yesterday I was linked to this mini-essay on wicked stepmothers.   The writer first makes a point that the correlation between unrelated men in the home and physical or sexual child abuse is high.  About 50x more likely if I recall (though still less likely than not).  “Unrelated men in the home” = Mom’s boyfriends or Mom’s new husband.  The Wicked Stepdad (or more commonly, the Wicked Stepboyfriend).  She then says that similarly the stepmother is much more likely than a biological mother to be emotionally abusive.  Its why wicked stepmothers pop up so much in fairy tales.  She lays out a series of mechanisms and steps which are point for point what happened in The Boys in the Boat.

Note: the statistics do not  mean that any given stepmother or stepfather, or even that stepfathers and stepmothers in general, are likely to be wicked.  People have a hard time with statistics emotionally so I think its important to point that out.  Most abusers are steps–true.  Most steps are abusers–false.

A rowing coach is looking at his freshman tryouts and musing on the coming years.  Victories?  Losses?  Championships?  The Olympics?

All that Ulbrickson knew, had to start here on this dock, with the boys who were now wandering off into the waning light.  Somewhere among them–those green and untested boys–lay much of the stock from which he would have to select a crew capable of going all the way.  The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the  indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique.  And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of the shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the boys in the boat.

-The Boys in the Boat

Thanks to the felicities of the LDS website’s ever-improving search function, I messed up last time in counting the references to ‘wives and children’ in the Book of Mormon.

The phrase ‘wives and children’* appears 32 times in the Book of Mormon.  25 times in what I call Nephite Modernity, or the Nephite Warring States period, the books of Mosiah and Alma.

The great majority of those are references to defending wives and children as a justification for warfare.

Outside of Nephite Modernity, the two ‘wives and children’ references that refer to defense are Mormon 2:23, where Mormon uses wives and children rhetoric to inspire this soldiers.  It kinda works–“and my words did arouse them somewhat to vigor.”  And Ether 14:2, where each Jaredite man has to sleep with his word to defend what is his during the night, including wife and children.  Its pretty clear that fighting to defend their homes was a huge part of Nephite ideology during the Mosiah-Alma period.  The other two references are, I suspect, Mormon being a Captain Moroni fanboy.  The first one is clearly Mormon modeling his speech on what worked during the Nephite glory days and the Ether chapter could be a Mormon summary where he inserted his own concept of what the Jaredites were fighting for, though I don’t know for sure.

*or some variant thereon, such as ‘our wives and our children’.

* Some decisions only success can justify.  We don’t like that because we want the rightness of our acts to be judged by our intentions. Even so.  Power is good, and holding power only lends more weight to preaching, so giving up power in order to preach is one of those decisions. In the case of Nephi Helaman’s son the decision succeeded spectacularly.  He and his brother converted thousands in areas they could not have gone to had they still been Nephite leaders

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