Month: July 2012

by liberal japonicus

This post starts with the juxtaposition of the Olympic Opening and my surgery for a detached retina, please skip it if you are squeamish about things going poke in your eye. However, no gross pictures below the fold.

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by Doctor Science

Last weekend I noticed two religion blogs, one Jewish and one evangelical (though not fundamentalist) Christian, discussing the same passages in the Bible: the ones commanding the Israelites to fight, slaughter, enslave, and dispossess the Canaanite inhabitants of the Land of Israel. To commit genocide, in fact.

The two ministers come across as reasonably similar in personality and emotional tone — I suspect they would get along quite well. Both read the Bible in historical-critical context, but they insist that it is necessary to read the Bible, not to just follow your bliss. Neither is willing to accept the “genocide commandments” as-is, but neither is willing to just throw them out or ignore them, either.

And they approach this text from different perspectives: asking different questions, using different tools. I was brought up as a Christian (in a Catholic/Lutheran family) but am now a practicing Jew, so I find a compare/contrast very illuminating. In this case, the Christian asks about the character or personality of God; the Jew asks what we Jews should *do*.

I am cutting this because it’s almost 2500(!!) words. A lot are quotes, thank goodness, but even so I may have gone a trifle overboard for many tastes.

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by liberal japonicus

Unfortunately, tomorrow, I need to have a second operation on my eye, so I'm posting this Thursday evening. (One can do a timed post, but I'm feeling a bit lazy) I brought Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain to read, which uses newly opened archives in the Soviet Union to help create a full history of the Spanish Civil War and have just finished it. A great read, and Beevor tells the story of Miguel de Unamuno's last speech. which I share below the fold:

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by Doctor Science

In the wake of the Aurora movie massacre, I noticed a couple of things about the firearms market in the US:

1. The proportion of American households owning a gun has been dropping since its 1977 high, and is especially low among people under 30:

2. Firearms are extremely durable goods:

While the automotive industry also has to compete against its own products over on the Used Car lot, no other industry—not even the jewelry business—has products with such longevity as the gun business.

A shrinking customer base for very durable products should mean that the market is contracting, right?

Yet,

3. Since Obama was nominated, firearm sales have surged to record levels:

What this all says to me is that the gun market is being driven by buyers who are stockpiling weapons. They probably don’t represent a very large proportion of all gun owners, but they are a large — and, I suspect, growing — proportion of all gun *sales*.

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by Doctor Science

The Kensington and Chelsea Library system (in London) has been posting clandestine street photos taken by Edward Linley Sambourne in the early 20th century. It’s not clear if Sambourne had a fetish for taking pictures of women who didn’t know they were being photographed or if these were intended as reference photos for his cartoons, but they are *fascinating*. What really strikes me is how women’s postures and gaits are much more modern than I expected.

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by Doctor Science

Or, Why is an election 4 months away more newsworthy than a crisis right now?

My parents, who live in Connecticut, recently got back from a trip to the Midwest for a family reunion. They left on Thursday, June 29, and came back on Tuesday July 3. This past Friday my mother called a cousin who lives near Gaithersburg, Maryland, to tell her about the reunion, since she hadn’t been able to make it. Mom was shocked to learn that her cousin had been without power for five or six days, after a huge windstorm on June 30th.

My parents were especially shocked because they had no idea — they had heard nothing about this outage from the news. Admittedly, while they’re traveling their access to news is a bit haphazard, and depends mostly on what other people choose to have on TV, but they would have expected the travails of people in the DC area to be considered significant enough to make it onto screens.

Instead, all they happened to see were heads talking about the Presidential election, the Supreme Court Obamacare decision, and the effect of the Supreme Court decision on the election. To quote my Mom, “election blah blah blah.”

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by Doctor Science

The Giant’s Causeway is a rock formation on the northern coast of Northern Ireland: interlocking basalt columns that look much more like a construct than like the products of volcanic eruption millions of years ago. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is by far the top tourist attraction in Northern Ireland.

The biggest fight the Giant’s Causeway has seen since Fionn mac Cumhaill (aka Finn MacCool) went after Benandonner is now shaping up, because one of the exhibits at the visitor’s center credits Young Earth Creationism and its “debate” with “current mainstream science”.

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by Doctor Science

There’s been a lot of ink, pixels, and electrons spilled this week over a CBS News report about Chief Justice Roberts switching his vote to uphold Obamacare. For me, the weirdest thing about this whole circus is that conservatives apparently think the article makes the four dissenting Justices look good, when — to me — the article shows them as petulant judicial activists too scared to engage with other people’s opinions.

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by Doctor Science

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber says my brain needs to know your sex:

I find it difficult (at quite an unconscious level, it seems) to correspond with someone I’ve never met without attributing a sex to that person, whereas I don’t think this holds for ‘race’, age, disability or something else.
…
Do you recognize this phenomenon? And if my self-analysis is correct, then I wonder: why is it the case that my brain needs to know the sex of unknown correspondents, but doesn’t seem to have the same needs with other personal and bodily characteristics?

There’s a pretty good discussion in comments, covering the gamut of explanations: evo-psycho, linguistic gender, privilege, etc.

Here’s my answer: it’s difficult because you haven’t practiced.

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