Month: December 2013

Race slavery in history and in modern Mauritania

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by Doctor Science Via Andrew Sullivan, I see Joshua Keating’s profile of modern abolitionist Biram Dah Abeid of Mauritania. Dah Abeid says: There are two types of laws in Mauritania. You have the “slave code,” which legitimizes and codifies slavery, and which gives the law a sacred aspect. These are books that were written in … Read more

That Depends Friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus Perhaps you've already seen this, but adult diapers are about to outsell baby diapers here in Japan. Of course, since it is the inscrutable Orient, no one is sure if it is going to be 2020 or if it was in 2011.  I find this even more remarkable, given that there is … Read more

All the “Eating” Holidays

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by Doctor Science Some friends once described their style of Jewish/Christian marriage as, “We observe all the ‘eating’ holidays.” We follow the same guidelines here, at least in regard to the winter solstice celebrations. Later today I will expand this post, hopefully with pictures of some of the delicious cholesterol-bomb cookies we’ve been making, by … Read more

Into the darkness again

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by Doctor Science

In honor of the darkest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) (when I started writing this), I’m going to give some advice relevant to a post that’s currently going around tumblr:

The problem with a history of depression and anxiety is that you can never know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if you’re sliding back down into those places you swore you’d never go again.

This is not actually true. As someone with >more depression-mileage than most on tumblr (as in, diagnosed and dealing with it for more than 20 years), I can say that no, you *can* know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if it’s more serious.

This advice is for people who’ve already been diagnosed with depression or depression+anxiety, gotten a bit better, and now wonder if they’re relapsing, just having a bad week, or whether they’re in a situation where feeling depressed is the normal human thing to do.

StarryMoonlit

Starry Moonlit Deep Winter Night, by Stephen Remick. I found this picture via google image search, and picked it because it so accurately evokes how moonlit snow can glow while the sky above is dark, as though the light of the sky is down and the earth’s darkness is up. It’s very New England.

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Leveling up in cooking

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by Doctor Science The other day Sprog the Younger was reading a story in which a character — a rather manly kind of man — was trying to bake a cake, despite having no prior experience. She LOLed, and then thanked me for teaching her these critical life skills, so that she, at least, knows … Read more

Misconceptions on the way to the Supreme Court

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by Doctor Science

As you would expect, I’ve got my own take on Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. Last week, Eugene Volokh did a series of posts about the case; I made some comments, which I’ll repost here, along with some other information I’ve dug up.

Williamsonfjhetty

Dinah Consoling Hetty in Prison, a sculpture by Francis John Williamson illustrating a scene from George Elliot’s Adam Bede. Spoilers [highlight to read]: Hetty is in prison for the crime of “child-murder”: she abandoned her new-born baby in the field where he was born. In the end, her sentence is commuted to transportation to Australia, along with the child’s father.

This illustration, like all others I’ve seen and like the BBC production, gets the characters’ looks fundamentally wrong. Dinah is rather cool and bland — not to say boring or plain — in appearance, while Hetty is extraordinarily *cute* — Elliot keep comparing her to kittens, lambs, etc. Jenna Coleman is the look they should be going for. But also [highlight to read]: Hetty is attractively “plump” — enough that no-one realizes she’s pregnant.

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Asymmetries and a goodbye

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by liberal japonicus

Back when the world was young and Obama was running for president, one of the points, which I uncharitably assume was thought to be sufficient to derail his candidacy and so indicated not a modicum of restraint, but a desire to use only as much mud as necessary, was to highlight his choice of focussing on his father over his mother and suggest (often sub rosa) some sort of indication of a rejection of all things Caucasian. 

While taken to idiotic heights by Dinesh D'Souza in his The Roots of Obama's Rage, the question of why he wrote extensively about his father yet, as Janny Scott, in her biography of Obama's mother, has her quoting second hand that Stanley Ann Dunham noted that her son had only reserved 'one sentence' for his mother might still be on people's minds. While it may be a bit of hubris, I think that I know what Obama was thinking. 

I suppose the same charge could be leveled against me, in that I have written about my mother (here and here) but not anything at length about my father. While it is possible, in some sort of 'all possible worlds' theory, that Obama is, in D'Souza's words 'governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s', there is a more understandable and, I believe, sympathetic, way to look at things, (not that D'Souza shows any ability to actually be understanding or sympathetic). More below the fold

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Corporate Personhood and Legal Fiction

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by Ugh Corporate "personhood" is in the news again with SCOTUS granting cert in the Hobby Lobby case to determine: Whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)…, which provides that the government “shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless that burden is the least restrictive means to further a compelling governmental interest, … Read more