Who Were the Sea Peoples?

My review of Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises is online at The American Conservative . (Clark is obviously a Hemingway fan and likes to make his book titles puns of Hemingway's, thus my question in the post title.)

Hoping to answer Bob Murphy's puzzlement over my remarks about rights: "Society is able to justify the possession of powers, or capabilities, by individuals and those it exercises over them because they are a necessary prerequisite to fulfilling 'man's vocation as a moral being'. We understand rights in this way, not because they are natural, but because the individual has the capacity to imagine a good that is common, which is the same for others as for himself, or herself, and is inspired to act on that conception. Rights are what enable our capacities to be realized, and serve to define the moral person. Despite the fact that a person is not born with the rights or powers necessary for fulfilling such a conception of the moral person, and does not possess them outside of society, they... are not arbitrary creations of law or custom. They are natural in a different sense from that required in the natural law and natural rights traditions... David Ritchie understo...

At the request of commentator "Mr": "No precise rule, therefore, can be laid down as to the conditions under which resistance to a despotic government becomes a duty. But the general questions which the good citizen should ask himself in contemplating such resistance will be, (a) What prospect is there of resistance to the sovereign power leading to a modification of its character or improvement in its exercise without its subversion? (b) If it is overthrown, is the temper of the people such--are the influences on which the general maintenance of social order and the fabric of recognized rights depend so far separable from it--that its overthrow will not mean anarchy? (c) If its overthrow does lead to anarchy, is the whole system of law and government so perverted by private interests hostile to the public, that there has ceased to be any common interest in maintaining it?" -- Principles of Political Obligation , p. 86

Here .

As someone said recently, there are always going to be gray areas when it comes to moral questions like "How great a risk of harm to innocents am I allowed to impose when defending myself against an attack?" But we can set out obvious cases to act as boundary markers, and then ask which of them a real situation more closely resembles. So: If someone is shooting at me out of the window of an occupied apartment building, I can shoot back at that window. If I hit his hostage inside, that is very unfortunate but I am not culpable. However, I cannot launch a rocket at the building that will take down the whole edifice. In the latter case, I am culpable.

I was watching Winter's Tale the other day and thinking about this: Why not show average-looking people falling in love in a romantic movie? (Not that it is never done, but it is rare, and tough to pull off, I think for the reasons discussed below.) Here's the thing: If someone is really in love, the person they are in love with is the most beautiful person in the world... to them. They recognize that the person may not be conventionally beautiful. But the very ways in which the beloved differs from the convention are apt, in fact, to be objects of special affection: his crooked smile, the gap in her teeth, his odd posture, her slightly crooked nose. But the audience for a romance movie is not in love with the lead actors. And so the audience will not see these characteristics as endearing, but simply as blemishes. The easiest way to convey the beauty that the lover sees in the beloved is simply to cast an actor possessing conventional beauty in the role. It takes true cinema...

"La storia, staccata dal documento vivo e resa cronaca, non è più un atto spirituale, ma una cosa, un complesso di suoni o di altri segni. Ma anche il documento, staccato dalla vita, è nient'altro che una cosa, simile all'altra, un complesso di suoni e di altri segni: per esempio, i suoni e le lettere nelle quali fu già comunicata una legge, le linee intagliate nel marmo e che manifestarono un sentimento religioso mercé la figura del dio, un mucchio di ossa con le quali si attuò un tempo l'organismo di un uomo o di un animale." -- Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , p. 23 "History, detached from the living document and made into chronicle, is no longer a spiritual act, but a thing, a complex of sounds or of other signs. But the document also, detached from life, is nothing other than a thing, similar to the other, a complex of sounds and other signs: for example, the sounds and the letters in which there was once communicated a law, the l...