Timothy Snyder on terrorism

I have been in flight from watching the news. But I want to share these observations, from the historian Timothy Snyder:

For the victim, terror is about what it is. For the terrorist, it is about what happens next.

Terror can be a weapon of the weak, designed to get the strong to use their strength against themselves. Terrorists know what they are going to do, and have an idea what will follow. They mean to create an emotional situation where self-destructive action seems like the urgent and only choice.

When you have been terrorized, the argument that I am making seems absurd; the terrorists can seem to you to be raving beasts who just need punishment. Yet however horrible the crime, it usually does not bespeak a lack of planning. Usually part of the plan is to enrage.

Americans have fallen for this. 9/11 was a successful terrorist attack because we made it so. Regardless of whether or not its planners and perpetrators lived to see this, it achieved its main goal: to weaken the United States. Without 9/11, the United States presumably would not have invaded Iraq, a decision which led to the death of tens of thousands of people, helped fund the rise of China, weakened international law, and undid American credibility. 9/11 was a contributing cause to American decisions that caused far more death than 9/11 itself did. But the point here is that 9/11 facilitated American decisions that hurt America far more than 9/11 itself did. . . .

Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.

I won’t claim to know what Hamas expects from Israel, nor what Israel should do. That would be a matter for people with the languages and expertise to read and analyze the documents and the data. My point is that it is always worth asking, in such situations, whether you are following the terrorist’s script. If what you want to do is what your enemy wants you to do, someone is mistaken. It might be your enemy. But it also might be you.

PS. I am conscious that the cool tone of this thread might seem jarring in the context of human suffering. I regret this.

PPS. I anticipate the objection that Israeli state policy has been designed to provoke Palestinians. I agree that the strong can also terrorize the weak.

Terence Davies (1945–2023)

The screenwriter and director Terence Davies has died at the age of seventy-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.

I’ve seen seven of Terence Davies’s films: Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), Death and Transfiguration (1983), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), Of Time and the City (2008), and The Deep Blue Sea (2011). Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes are among my favorite films of, as they say, all time. And I was looking forward to Davies’s adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, which was supposed to begin filming this past summer.

[Gift link, no subscription needed.]

Proust and turbines

From The Times: “Remembrance of things past halts turbines in Proust country”:

The Council of State, the highest bench for litigation involving the state, rejected a project to install eight 150-metre tall wind turbines within sight of the town where the writer spent his childhood summers, now named llliers-Combray, southwest of Chartres.

The article can be read only in part without a subscription, but there’s enough to get the gist of it.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

A Bill Griffith talk

At The New School tonight, 7:00 Eastern: Bill Griffith talks about Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller, and Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created “Nancy.” Details here. To sign up for streaming, send an e-mail to comicssymposium@gmail.com.

Related reading
My review of Three Rocks

Fran and Charles

Fran Lebowitz talks with Doug Doyle about her friendship with Charles Mingus (WBGO). With special appearances by Duke Ellington and an apple pancake.

And here’s the entire conversation.

Related reading
All OCA Fran Lebowitz posts : Charles Mingus posts (Pinboard)

Harry Smith at the Whitney

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, an exhibition devoted to the life and work of Harry Smith, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith:

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith puts the artist’s life on display alongside his art and collections. It follows him from an isolated Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest — a time when he was immersed in ecstatic religious philosophies and Native American ceremony — to his bohemian youth of marijuana, peyote, and intellectualism in postwar Berkeley, California. The exhibition also traces his path through the milieus of bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco to his decades in New York, where he was an essential part of the city’s avant-garde fringe.

Harry Smith is probably best known as the mind behind the Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952). That too is part of the exhibit.

Noisy colors

The Washington Post looks at — listens to different colors of noise: “Beyond white noise: How different ‘color’ sounds help or hurt” (gift link).

I often used brown or pink noise in my office to cut sound from the hallway and a nearby classroom. I never fell asleep, but gosh, could I concentrate. From a 2012 post about a now-defunct Mac app: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.”

Today there are many apps and websites generating noisy colors. Here’s a free site I just discovered: noisetool.

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Drugs, groceries, books Now with a second bookstore, Djuna Books.

“In conclusion”

Today’s Zits: yes, just a mild exaggeration of how some students think about writing. It’s what they call “fluff.”

Jeremy, you need to read How to unstuff a sentence.

OCA, immobile again

After a brief effort using mobile view with this blog, I’ve switched back to desktop view. I have my reasons:

~ No personality. Mobile view makes one blog look exactly like some other blog.

~ To my eye, the typography and lineation look clumsy. The dateline is squashed to an unreadable white on grey; post titles are sometimes broken across two lines when they would easily fit on one. On the main page, the handful of lines that display for each post ignore italics and line breaks.

~ No widgets. No Creative Commons statement, no archive links, no links for favorite posts, no nothing. I know that it’s possible, in theory, to add widgets, but from everything I’ve read, it’s a doubtful venture. And anyway, where would they go? I know that it’s also possible, at least in theory, to edit numerous chunks of Blogger code to create what’s called responsive view, with the page enlarging or shrinking to fit a device’s display, but here too, from everything I’ve read, the prospect of getting things right is doubtful. And anyway, a smaller version of OCA-as-it-is is exactly what Google declares unusable on a mobile device.

~ I dropped the URL of an exceedingly well-known tech website into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page. The result: “Page isn’t usable on mobile.” But it’s perfectly usable. Enlarge the page so that the sidebar slides off the screen and everything’s readable.

~ Statcounter tells me that about 40% of visits to Orange Crate Art are by way of mobile devices. No one has ever complained that a page is unusable or suggested that I use mobile view. So if it isn’t ain’t broke —