The University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.
***
Whether playing tricks, mimicking speech, or holding “funerals,” crows and ravens (collectively known as corvids) have captured the public’s attention due to their unexpected intelligence. Thanks to results from a new Current Biology study, our understanding of their capabilities only continues to grow, as researchers from the University of Tübingen found for the first time that crows can perform statistical reasoning.
***
The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).
***
Proportionality
There has been a lot of interesting material about Israel. The original outrage has begun to fade. One of these has been the discussion of "proportionality" in warfare. "Proportionality" is being used a lot, especially by the press--and college students. But "proportionality has a definition; it relates to risk and reward, not balance. McCarthy has a good article in the Post on it.
This is it.
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"In recent days, my brilliant colleague Douglas Murray schooled a British interviewer who challenged his defense of Israel’s military response to the October 7 atrocities carried out by Hamas.
She banged on about the need for “proportionality.”
Douglas illustrated the absurdity of touting this law-of-war principle as if it meant that Israel should limit itself to raping the precise number of women as Hamas did, while similarly killing precisely the same number of babies, elderly non-combatants, and young peace-concert revelers.
The proportionality twaddle is a hobby horse of anti-Western leftists – ever ready to rationalize the barbarity of jihadists who recognize no constraints on their tactics.
It came into vogue in the years after 9/11.
Following the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, American and allied armed forces were dispatched to take the fight to the jihadists’ strongholds overseas.
In response, the Muslim Brotherhood’s pom-pom squad at CAIR, and its familiar echo chamber – the media, American university campuses, and the political left generally – lectured incessantly that our combat operations must be “proportionate.”
Their distortion of this commonsense military principle is being echoed today.
As should be obvious, proportionality is nothing so ridiculous as eye-for-an-eye limits on responsive combat.
For one thing, we don’t fight that way: American, Israeli, and other Western military forces do not wage war by targeting and terrorizing civilians, including raping women, murdering the defenseless, or taking hostages and using them as human shields.
Those are war crimes – a term at which jihadists scoff, for it describes atrocities they execute precisely because we are horrified by them.
Western military forces regard such savagery as unacceptable, regardless of the enemy’s resort to it.
So what, then, is proportionality?
It is a principle that requires military commanders, when they determine battlefield targets, to weigh the importance of the military objective against the likelihood of “collateral damage” – i.e., civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.
Significantly, proportionality does not mean an army is prohibited from attacking if it knows there will be collateral damage.
To the contrary, if the military objective is important enough, collateral damage is a baleful but unavoidable consequence of warfare.
The military commander is obliged to try to minimize collateral damage, but not to the point of refraining from attacking important military targets.
If important targets are not hit, wars last far longer, and there’s nothing humanitarian about insisting on more carnage.
The object of war is not to achieve a stalemate. It is to defeat the enemy. It is to achieve the legitimate objectives that drive a people to go to war.
In some conflicts, objectives are limited. In others, such as Israel’s battle against Hamas, they are more comprehensive.
Israel has to demolish Hamas as a capable fighting force, for two reasons.
First, there can never be an armistice with an enemy that denies a nation’s right to exist and is committed to its extirpation.
Second, there can be no peaceful settlement between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors unless and until the latter abandon the commitment to Israel’s destruction that is tirelessly promoted and fomented by Hamas and its jihadist allies – not least, its patrons in Tehran.
These are legitimate military objectives. Israel is in a just defensive war, and it is permitted by the laws of war to pursue its objectives, until they are achieved, even if civilians and civilian infrastructure will be gravely harmed.
Clearly, Israel is doing the best it can – far more, I daresay than any other country would – to minimize collateral damage.
Indeed, it is going many extra miles to create corridors for civilian safe-passage from Gaza battlefields, which will undoubtedly enable many Hamas jihadists to escape.
Nevertheless, this concern for non-combatant elements of the enemy does not supersede the imperative of defeating the enemy.
Proportionality is not, as Israel’s detractors would have it, a doctrine that limits offensive combat operations to the harm a nation has sustained from the enemy’s operations.
It is not a principle that says, “use only as much force as the enemy, and no more.” Such a perverse rule would prevent the use of force necessary to defeat jihadists while allowing them, the terrorist aggressors, to dictate the terms of battle.
Nor is proportionality a prohibition against military targeting that would inevitably harm or kill civilians.
Proportionality simply dictates that military forces fighting a just war must concentrate on legitimate military targets and do the best they can, within reason, to minimize collateral damage.
It is not a straitjacket that makes legitimate military objectives unattainable.
It does not insulate from attack monsters who meld into civilian population centers, and who launch their attacks from – and stash their arsenals in – schools, mosques, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.
Proportionality is a rule of reason, not of surrender."
"In recent days, my brilliant colleague Douglas Murray schooled a British interviewer who challenged his defense of Israel’s military response to the October 7 atrocities carried out by Hamas.
She banged on about the need for “proportionality.”
Douglas illustrated the absurdity of touting this law-of-war principle as if it meant that Israel should limit itself to raping the precise number of women as Hamas did, while similarly killing precisely the same number of babies, elderly non-combatants, and young peace-concert revelers.
The proportionality twaddle is a hobby horse of anti-Western leftists – ever ready to rationalize the barbarity of jihadists who recognize no constraints on their tactics.
It came into vogue in the years after 9/11.
Following the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, American and allied armed forces were dispatched to take the fight to the jihadists’ strongholds overseas.
In response, the Muslim Brotherhood’s pom-pom squad at CAIR, and its familiar echo chamber – the media, American university campuses, and the political left generally – lectured incessantly that our combat operations must be “proportionate.”
Their distortion of this commonsense military principle is being echoed today.
As should be obvious, proportionality is nothing so ridiculous as eye-for-an-eye limits on responsive combat.
For one thing, we don’t fight that way: American, Israeli, and other Western military forces do not wage war by targeting and terrorizing civilians, including raping women, murdering the defenseless, or taking hostages and using them as human shields.
Those are war crimes – a term at which jihadists scoff, for it describes atrocities they execute precisely because we are horrified by them.
Western military forces regard such savagery as unacceptable, regardless of the enemy’s resort to it.
So what, then, is proportionality?
It is a principle that requires military commanders, when they determine battlefield targets, to weigh the importance of the military objective against the likelihood of “collateral damage” – i.e., civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.
Significantly, proportionality does not mean an army is prohibited from attacking if it knows there will be collateral damage.
To the contrary, if the military objective is important enough, collateral damage is a baleful but unavoidable consequence of warfare.
The military commander is obliged to try to minimize collateral damage, but not to the point of refraining from attacking important military targets.
If important targets are not hit, wars last far longer, and there’s nothing humanitarian about insisting on more carnage.
The object of war is not to achieve a stalemate. It is to defeat the enemy. It is to achieve the legitimate objectives that drive a people to go to war.
In some conflicts, objectives are limited. In others, such as Israel’s battle against Hamas, they are more comprehensive.
Israel has to demolish Hamas as a capable fighting force, for two reasons.
First, there can never be an armistice with an enemy that denies a nation’s right to exist and is committed to its extirpation.
Second, there can be no peaceful settlement between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors unless and until the latter abandon the commitment to Israel’s destruction that is tirelessly promoted and fomented by Hamas and its jihadist allies – not least, its patrons in Tehran.
These are legitimate military objectives. Israel is in a just defensive war, and it is permitted by the laws of war to pursue its objectives, until they are achieved, even if civilians and civilian infrastructure will be gravely harmed.
Clearly, Israel is doing the best it can – far more, I daresay than any other country would – to minimize collateral damage.
Indeed, it is going many extra miles to create corridors for civilian safe-passage from Gaza battlefields, which will undoubtedly enable many Hamas jihadists to escape.
Nevertheless, this concern for non-combatant elements of the enemy does not supersede the imperative of defeating the enemy.
Proportionality is not, as Israel’s detractors would have it, a doctrine that limits offensive combat operations to the harm a nation has sustained from the enemy’s operations.
It is not a principle that says, “use only as much force as the enemy, and no more.” Such a perverse rule would prevent the use of force necessary to defeat jihadists while allowing them, the terrorist aggressors, to dictate the terms of battle.
Nor is proportionality a prohibition against military targeting that would inevitably harm or kill civilians.
Proportionality simply dictates that military forces fighting a just war must concentrate on legitimate military targets and do the best they can, within reason, to minimize collateral damage.
It is not a straitjacket that makes legitimate military objectives unattainable.
It does not insulate from attack monsters who meld into civilian population centers, and who launch their attacks from – and stash their arsenals in – schools, mosques, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.
Proportionality is a rule of reason, not of surrender."
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