What a Funny Thing War Is
Megan McArdle makes short work of a bizarre defense of the essential nobility of firebombing by one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers. Maybe the strangest feature of the argument is that Sullivan’s reader is apparently a Quaker. (He went to a Quaker High School and attended Meeting. It’s possible that the high school requires Meeting attendance even of non-Quakers.)
Comment by belle waring —
April 25, 2008 @ 2:00 am
IIRC everyone at sidwell friends in dc had to go to meeting, quaker or not. not 100% sure as I was busy attending mandatory cathedral services at ncs at the time.
Comment by TGGP —
April 25, 2008 @ 4:02 am
Richard Nixon and Smedley Butler were Quakers.
Comment by Farah —
April 25, 2008 @ 5:09 am
Depends which Quaker school.
Draw a line down the centre of the US. Roughly, the Quakers to the right are pacifist foxites. The Quakers to the left are evangelicals who are not pacfists, and who took missions abroad so they are the majority in the Quaker world.
Before you then jump to any conclusions, its the ones to the left who joined the Union army to help liberate slaves.
The map of Quaker politics is tortuous (Thomas Hamm wrote a great book on it).
Comment by Slag —
April 25, 2008 @ 5:37 am
Short ineffective work, the comments there indicate.
Comment by Nell —
April 25, 2008 @ 10:44 am
It’s possible that the high school requires Meeting attendance even of non-Quakers.)
They probably did. The Quaker high school I attended was about half birthright Quakers, and we had mandatory meeting on First Day (Sunday) and Fourth Day (Wednesday, which was more in the character of an assembly because it was a school day, we had assigned seats).
Having grown up in the Episcopalian church, I missed the music something fierce for a while.
The Fourth Day meetings had a tendency to turn into debating sessions, and every now and then one of the elders would gently ask everyone to pause before rising to speak and examine whether what they were about to say was really prompted by the inner light…
Comment by Nell —
April 25, 2008 @ 10:47 am
Quakers joined the fight in the civil war on both sides, though not in great numbers, and some in the south were slaveholders.
The minutes of meetings from those years are a strong antidote to complacent self-regard by Quakers. Chuck Fager of Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC, does a presentation based on those minutes.
Comment by Barry —
April 25, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
Comment by Slag —
April 25, 2008 @ 5:37 am
“Short ineffective work, the comments there indicate. ”
Which is yet another data point in the Megan S*cks file. After watching her write, it’s clear to me why she didn’t flourish in the business world, even with a MBA from one of the best B-schools on the planet. She’s glib but incredibly shallow, and logic isn’t even her third language.