Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism came out in the spring, but I only recently got a chance to read it — supposedly it wasn’t all that popular, but it still took a while to work its way down to me on the public library waiting list.

The Crisis of Zionism may not have gotten much in the way of sales, but it sure generated a lot of heat. Andrew Sullivan did a pretty thorough job of tracking reviews and commentary about the book — most of which was negative, to Sully’s great disappointment.

My take: Beinart is talking about a real, critically important issue for Israel, Zionism, and the worldwide Jewish community:

In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself.

I think the book’s greatest weakness is that Beinart mostly talks about the issue as a political problem, to be solved by political means. He doesn’t spend enough time thinking about this as a religious or spiritual issue: the non-Orthodox majority of American Jews are finding Zionism-as-she-is-practiced less and less compatible with our beliefs about what we, as Jews, are called to do. American Jews are not becoming more secular, we are becoming more religious — but in a different way than Israeli Jews.

I had intended to write and put up this post at the beginning of the Days of Awe, for seasonally-appropriate discussion, but it grew to be over 4000(!!) words long. By that point there wasn’t time to have an actual discussion before I would have had to close the comments for Yom Kippur. So I’m posting it now, for an early start on *next* year’s Days of Awe.

Be warned that I will be policing the comments with extra firmness — I’m aware that this topic is one of the third rails of the Internet, with Godwin pre-installed. Historical comparisons had better be supported by historical evidence, not just by your feelings.

Four different shofar calls are sounded on Rosh Hashanah; you can hear them in this YouTube video. The Yom Kippur service ends with the long blast, Tekiah Gadolah, prefiguring the Last Trump of Judgment Day. If your shofar-blower is bald or nearly so, you’ll see a wave of red (or even purple!) wash over his whole scalp for the last seconds of the call.

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2016: Obama’s America is a documentary[1] by Dinesh D’Souza, based on his books “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and “Obama’s America”. So far it’s doing extremely well at the box office. The premise of books and movie, according to Wikipedia, is

that Barack Obama’s attitude toward America derives from his father’s anti-colonialism and from a psychological desire to fulfill his father’s dream of diminishing the power of Western imperial states.

I have no intention of giving D’Souza money, so I haven’t seen it, but most critics say it’s pretty awful.

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In the comments to my previous post, McKinney TX mentioned his impression that

Public education, roads, police and fire protection, courts, life safety regulatory bodies and services(sanitation, clean water, food, public air travel, offshore drilling, etc) are miniscule gov’t outlays. Add in national defense, and it’s still easily affordable.

That can’t be right, I thought. What are the *real* figures?

Research happened. Most of the first Google results for “total government spending” and similar go to usgovernmentspending.com, a self-described “conservative” site that’s nicely data-heavy, but makes some odd choices — like making “pensions” a separate category. I went to the OECD and pulled some numbers for *total* government spending — that is, Federal plus state plus local. Going to the OECD means we can readily compare the US with other countries.

Summary: Many of the problems Americans think of as being characteristic of government per se (e.g. inefficiency and waste) seem to actually be specific to government in the United States. Overall, US government is either exceptionally inefficient, exceptionally ill-targeted, or exceptionally corrupt. Or a combination of all three.

Total spending at all levels of government for 2008

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I’m back from my week in beautiful Undisclosed Location, where internet access was a slow and unreliable thing. And where there was no TV and no newspapers, except the one with restaurant phone numbers. Besides sleeping, eating, walking, swimming, more eating, beer, shopping, live music, berry-picking, and yet more eating (note absence of *cooking*, an essential ingredient in making it a vacation), I talked to people face-to-face, and I read books. Lots of books. Five non-fiction and two fiction, and now I’m going to tell you about them.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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In my previous post about reviews of “The Avengers”, I said Black Widow seemed to be “The Superhero Men Don’t See”. I’ve now done some more research and am pretty sure the cognitive problem isn’t with men, it’s with mundanes — non-fans or Muggles, that is. It’s an instance of the Invisible Gorilla problem; sexism comes in only as the easiest way for the reviewer’s brain to patch the hole in hir perceptions.

I was already thinking about the Invisible Gorilla when Porlock Junior brought it up in the comments to the previous post, because I had just finished reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is about all sorts of cognitive biases or illusions.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is one of the best-known such illusions. The subjects were told to count the number of times the basketball is passed between black-shirted players in the following video:

YouTube link

A truly astounding number of the subjects never noticed the guy in the gorilla suit, because they were concentrating so hard on the basketball.

I’m cutting for length, and because I’m going to be spoiling the heck out of “The Avengers”.

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Ever make a connection between two ideas, and now you’re not sure they’re *really* connected, but you can’t unconnect them in your brain? And part of you thinks, “brain, you are weird and disturbing, it’s just a coincidence, shut up”, and another part thinks “but look at how they match! disturbingly!”

And the third part says, Let’s post it to the Internet!

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