It is imperative that we not neglect to notice the informational content and instructive point-by-pointing of the recent blog ("web log") post by our colleague, the Conscientious Objector, wherein he challenges the paradigm and raises the bar of the clarity of inter-office memos, technical documents, and other business-oriented, primarily internal-directed writings. Certainly read thoroughly this document and circulate amongst your varied departments per the necessity of the information contained therein re: stylistic incomprehensibility and obtuseness of prosiness.
Apropos of the comment below, Amy Welborn writes an open letter to Maureen Dowd telling her to shut up. Dowd tries to draw a comparison between Pope Benedict XVI and Dick Cheney. The problem is she knows nothing about the Catholic Church. Welborn writes:
But maybe I just don't get it. I've got a Master's degree in religion, I've taught school, and I've written a slew of books. I value understanding, knowledge, research and the truth. I am loathe to open my mouth and opine about anything unless I really have looked into it. There's a couple of reasons for that: first, I like to be based in reality. Secondly: I don't like looking stupid. Is that not a Blue State value?
What is Dowd's problem with Benedict? He "wants to dismantle Vatican II and go back to 1397." Does she know that Ratzinger was one of the most influential figures of the Second Vatican Council? Does she know that he was one of the leading progressive figures at Vatican II and was considered and opponent of the traditionalist factions there? No. She can't be bothered to actually learn anything about Church history. She's too busy writing about it.
What else is wrong with him? "As a scholar, his specialty was 'patristics,' the study of the key thinkers in the first eight centuries of the church." He studies the Church Fathers! Oh dear Lord, we are all doomed! I wonder if Maureen knows that there are "classicists" that study even older writers. They must be really reactionary.
Because I only blog about very serious stuff, here's some pretty artwork. (nsfw)
On the subject of great artists, this woman is a true visionary. (sfw)
Baked art. (sfw)
Sexdoll art. (duh: nsfw)
Lastly, just in case you have never seen Salad Fingers, here you go. The fifth one is probably the best.
No doubt others have written on this topic with greater erudition and understanding than I, but I had a minor epiphany in the shower this morning that I thought I'd share. One of Freud's structures of the mind exactly mirrors Christian theology. Whether this is a datum of evidence in support of Freud, a purposeful revision on his part (seems unlikely since he was a staunch atheist), or a reflection of the fact that people's thought does not change nearly as much between eras as we often assume, I'm not sure. For those of you whose knowledge of Freud is a little rusty, I'll briefly review. He has other theories for the way in which the mind is structured, but the id/ego/superego one is the most famous. To begin, etymology: in Latin "id" is "it," "ego" is "I," and "superego" is "above-I." This is a point often neglected when Freud is taught that I think is quite useful. The ego is the conscious self, the id the site of repressed desires, and the superego the conscience/societal law/agent of repression. The subject absorbs society's laws (what Lacan later calls the Symbolic or the Name of the Father) into the superego which then monitors the desires of the ego. Any unacceptable desires are repressed to the id which is wholly unconscious and inaccessible, hence the name "it." Compare this to the relationship between hell, earth, and heaven and the similarities are startling. Heaven is where God, the ultimate Father or law-giver, lives. He looks down on the earth where we experience time and monitors our desires. Those who do not adhere to the Law are ultimately cast down into hell and thus repressed/suppressed. Is this something that is just completely obvious to everyone else? It wouldn't be the first time I was slow to make a connection.
For anyone who has ever been annoyed, puzzled, or confused by the 12 to 13 men illusion, here is the definitive answer.
Apparently, the recent article about papyrus discoveries should be taken somewhat skeptically for now. Shows what I know.
I'm not sure how to react to the choice of Ratzinger as Pope. Since he's German, I suppose I'm going read up about him. David, who blogs at Dialog International--the best (liberal) German-American blog--is disappointed with the choice for political reasons. After all, Ratzinger has definitively positioned himself on the conservative side of the culture war and he intervened in the US Presidential race, ordering priests not to give communion to abortion supporters. In addition, Sullivan points out that Ratzinger publicly opposes the entry of Turkey into the EU--setting the stage for a cultural battle that we liberal internationalists have been desperate to avoid.
On the other side, Michael Novak of National Review, believes Ratzinger is the man to fight moral relativism.
Lance Armstrong has announced that he is to retire after attempting his record seventh-straight Tour de France this summer. Armstrong says that he likes it when athletes go out on top, so I hope that will give him enough motivation to win this July. He's always had motivation: for his first race, he had lost sponsorships after cancer, and he wanted to prove that he could still get it done. His second Tour was to show it wasn't a fluke. By his third Tour, the doping allegations had come up. In his fourth, it was to show that he could still win when the biggies (Ullrich, et al.) were competing also. The fifth was for the record. The sixth, last year, was the Tour de Sheryl Crow.
Unfortunately for me, I will be studying for the Bar from May to July 28th, so I won't get to watch early-morning OLN, but the rest of you guys should tune in to watch history.
Speaking of Garry Kasparov, you have probably heard about the latest Bobby Fischer fiasco. Fischer is a fascinating subject, even for a chess imbecile like me. I could read for hours about his tremendous genius and success at fifteen, his victory against Spassky in 1972 (where his behavior already betrayed his creeping insanity), his retirement and subsequent rematch in 1992 (another victory, though not as one-sided), his rants against FIDE and the chess establishment (he now claims to only play "Fischerandom," where the back rank is scrambled before the match, but he is rumored to haunt various online chess sites), and, most tragic and intriguing of all, his rants against Jews, Israel, and the United States. A couple of years ago, the Atlantic featured a great article on all of this, available here to subscribers. (Sorry, I don't have a un/pw.)
Anyway, he was recently arrested and detained in Japan for having an invalid passport. He is wanted by the US for, ostensibly, violating international sanctions by playing the 1992 match in Yugoslavia. In an incredible demonstration of support, Iceland decided to extend citizenship to Fischer, apparently in gratitude for his 1972 match in Reykjavik. Iceland has an extradition treaty with the US, but it does not extend to Icelandic citizens. (Nonetheless, a Philadelphia grand jury is convening to indict Fischer this week.)
I know this is a very convoluted story, but I figure most of you know all of this already. Click the extended entry to read about when Bobby Fischer will play Garry Kasparov for the first time ever.
Okay, that was a tease. At least one writer has speculated that it is possible, but it seems like a pipe dream. Like Mr. Barden says, it wouldn't really be a fair matchup anyway with Fischer 62 (and batshit insane) and Kasparov a spry 42.
Two more things I wanted to mention about this. While browsing pages online, I came across Kasparov's book on Fischer--part of his "My Great Predecessors" series. According to the comments, it is a notably biased and narcissistic look at Fischer's career. One commenter says that the book is written to suggest that if the two played, Kasparov would be the victor. Kasparov is probably understandably defensive about his legacy; comparisons between the two are unavoidable, and chess nerds will never settle which was the better champion.
Lastly, and the reason I started re-reading about Fischer this week, I saw ESPN's broadcast of the Fischer press conference that took place late last month (Sportscenter is just showing the tape this week). Jeremy Schaap, an ESPN anchor, is the son of the late Dick Schaap, who was a friend of Bobby Fischer. Jeremy flew to the press conference to interview Fischer, and the two had a very tense exchange in front of the gaggle of reporters. Fischer called Schaap's father a "Jewish snake," Jeremy delicately objected, and Fischer asked Jeremy why Dick Schaap had said that he didn't have "a sane bone in his body." Jeremy responded by saying that Fischer hadn't done anything today to disprove what he had said. A really fascinating bit of tape, not least for the freak factor of just seeing Fischer in the flesh, frantically spouting all of that crap he used to preach from his Cuban radio broadcasts.
For other perspectives of the press conference: here and here.
This is incredibly exciting news:
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.. . .
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it [infra-red technology] to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
It would be absolutely wonderful if they managed to recover a large number of lost works. Not only would it force Classical scholars to adjust their understanding of practically the entire corpus (itself an exciting proposition for scholars), but the world would be granted more worthy literature from the beginning of Western civilization. I'm convinced that, had the Greeks not owned slaves and thus associated all manual labor with slavery, they and not the Romans would have been the dominant power in the West for a thousand years. Couple that with an Alexandrian library that doesn't burn down and we'd probably already have colonies on the moon.
Here's an entertaining game along the lines of the laser one posted long ago. This one, however, requires you to make changes to mirrors while a ball is bouncing around.
My position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has wildly vacillated throughout my short life. I have gone from a being a former Evangelical who thought that the Jews deserved all of Israel including the occupied territory because God had given it to them in the Bible to a vigorous defender of the Palestinians who saw their terrorism as an almost justified response to Israeli strikes.
As of late I have lost almost all of my sympathy for the Palestinians' plight (they have no one to blame but themselves for not having their own state) while at the same time increasing my sympathy for the Israelis not a bit. The fact of the matter is that while in some way my views have become what one might call increasingly nuanced, a more accurate description is that they have become increasingly indifferent. The reason? They are pretty well explained in this Atlantic article which lays out the demographic reality of the Holy Land. Unless they want to get serious about making babies, the likelihood of maintaining a viable Jewish state is decreasing on a daily basis.
But even assuming that a comprehensive settlement could be reached, Israel's long-term prospects are bleak. The late Faisal Husseini, a moderate PLO official and a scion of one of Arab Jerusalem's great families, said, "I worry about today. But the Israelis should worry about the future." Today the Palestinian cause is fragmented, and its people are exhausted. Israel, on the other hand, negotiates from a position of unassailable military strength. But the Zionist enterprise has never been able to transcend the demographic and geographic realities that have haunted it from its inception. Regardless of the moral opprobrium one might attach to either party, the seeds of the all-but-unsolvable Palestinian-refugee problem were sown when Israel recognized in 1948 that it couldn't function with a vast and hostile Palestinian population (indeed, even the relatively small number of Palestinians who remained in Israel after the war for independence lived under military rule until 1966). Today Israeli Arabs (that is, Palestinians living within Israel's pre-1967 borders and in East Jerusalem) have one of the highest population-growth rates in the world (among Israeli Arabs in the Negev, specifically, it is the highest), and they now make up about 20 percent of Israel's population; demographers project that they'll compose nearly a quarter of the population by 2020, and as much as 30 percent by 2050. (These figures don't count the approximately 150,000 Palestinian noncitizens, drawn to Israel largely by the prospect of higher-paying jobs, who live there illegally.) Such large antagonistic minorities have historically engendered conflict and calls for binationalism, which would further weaken the Jewish state.
And this all points to my other conclusion about the conflict: The creation of the state of Israel was a bad idea from the start that has always faced difficult odds at succeeding.
...is apparently not so happy: a series of black and white photos of unhappy people at Walt Disney Land.
(via BoingBoing)
As the blog's proprietor notes, activity is light due to academic obligations on the part of most contributors. So it seems this is the perfect opportunity for those of us for whom "reading" and "education" are wastes of time invented by the Left to trick you into submitting to their mind control to make a contribution. So despite my lack of blogging here going back almost a year I thought I might try my hand at it until the lefties return to continue their brainwash regimen.
Two thoughts on the DeLay imbroglio. Santorum's comments on "This Week" are the latest sign that deep below the surface there is unrest among members of the GOP with DeLay. Yet the line that is being repeated over and over is the fact that Reps. Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel and the entire Democrat establishment are heavily targeting DeLay for removal is actually bolstering DeLay's support among GOP House members and party leaders. As Bob Novak notes in his column of today:
Ironically, this campaign's intensity may protect DeLay from Republicans who in their secret hearts would like to see the sometimes-overbearing Texan fall. No GOP politician wants to be the handmaiden of DeLay's Democratic detractors. Last Wednesday's closed-door caucus of House Republicans gave DeLay a standing ovation.
So Republicans don't want to help the Dem's succeed at ousting DeLay. But more than that, the implication seems to be that a successful attack on DeLay equals a successful attack on the current Congressional hegemony of the GOP. Yesterday the Washington Post reports, "These officials said they believe the attacks are part of a strategy by Democrats, aided by watchdog groups funded by liberals, to use the ethics process to try to regain power."
My question is this: Putting aside for a moment any concerns about morality or ethics and thinking in terms of pure strategy, does DeLay's ouster really translate into a detriment to the GOP? If every time a news story comes out that gives the appearance of unethical behavior on the part of Delay, Republican members respond with unwavering loyalty to the Leader, are they really helping themselves? I am not sure that a successful "hit" on a single member by the opposition translates into overall negative electoral results for the GOP at the national level. Without a doubt it is a trophy that Pelosi can hang proudly and prominently in her office. Daschle was such a trophy for the GOP last year. But there is a difference. Daschle was defeated over an issue: the judicial filibuster. This was an issues the entire Democratic caucus was a party to. And Daschle has become a depressing reminder to electorally vulnerable Democratic Senators that they should tread carefully when it comes to opposing President Bush's nominees.
If DeLay were demoted (or, and this seems entirely unlikely, not reelected) he would simply become a symbol for what happens when one behaves unethically. Republican members would simply need to distance themselves from him and avoid the appearance that they put principle over party.
My second DeLay related thought has to do with media bias. I have noticed that the press has done their best to conflate DeLay's ethical . . . ahem . . . lapses with his ideology. This is namely in regard to his comments on judiciary. The Post gives us this:
The comments by Shays and Santorum came amid growing signs of waning support from DeLay's friends. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) all have taken more moderate positions than DeLay on restraining federal judges. On Friday, when Bush was asked about DeLay's comments that judges are out of control and should be held accountable, the president replied that he believes in "an independent judiciary." He said nothing about DeLay.
The fact of the matter is that if DeLay gets taken down it will be because of concerns about his ethics not concerns that he is too far to the right or too radical when it comes to the judiciary.
The drought of astonishing wisdom wrapped in scintillating prose will continue. The end of the semester nears and I haven't planned well, forcing me to spend almost all my free time reading. So, unless other members of the council step in (most of whom are also dealing with fin de semestre work), things will remain quieter than usual here for a while.
Although this isn't one of the hot topics right now (amazing how gay marriage was no longer an Urgent! Threat! after the election), Jim Henley has a well-written and well-argued post up that takes apart at least one conservative argument against gay marriage. It's works at the level of social structure and policy rather than moral values—the kind of social policy argument I prefer, particularly on this issue where the moral argument is unlikely to sway anyone. Either you think homosexuality is immoral or you don't. Since I don't (and think that the position that demonizes homosexuality is, itself, immoral), any argument against gay marriage on that basis is sure to bounce off my evil, liberal armor. The secular, pragmatic arguments Henley treats are, thus, far more interesting.
Just a brief note to point out that the Conscientious Objector has begun a series of speculations on Middle Earth wherein he considers real-world analogues for Tolkien's lands inhabited by Men. There are only two posts so far, but the level of detail is already quite impressive.
Even Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered, a collection of Dr. Pepper knock-off sodas. They even rank them for you (Dr. Riffic wins). The link to this particular site was embedded in defective yeti post that proposes a new word to encompass Dr. Pepper and its rip-offs for ease of ordering at fast food restaurants.
